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Timsort is a hybrid, stable sorting algorithm, derived from merge sort and insertion sort, designed to perform well on many kinds of real-world data.It was implemented by Tim Peters in 2002 for use in the Python programming language.
A sorting algorithm is stable if whenever there are two records R and S with the same key, and R appears before S in the original list, then R will always appear before S in the sorted list. When equal elements are indistinguishable, such as with integers, or more generally, any data where the entire element is the key, stability is not an issue.
Such a component or property is called a sort key. For example, the items are books, the sort key is the title, subject or author, and the order is alphabetical. A new sort key can be created from two or more sort keys by lexicographical order. The first is then called the primary sort key, the second the secondary sort key, etc.
A comparison sort cannot use less than log 2 (n!) comparisons on average to sort n items (as explained in the article Comparison sort) and in case of large n, Stirling's approximation yields log 2 (n!) ≈ n(log 2 n − log 2 e), so quicksort is not much worse than an ideal comparison sort. This fast average runtime is another reason for ...
Sorted arrays are the most space-efficient data structure with the best locality of reference for sequentially stored data. [citation needed]Elements within a sorted array are found using a binary search, in O(log n); thus sorted arrays are suited for cases when one needs to be able to look up elements quickly, e.g. as a set or multiset data structure.
In computer science, Merge Sort (also commonly spelled as mergesort and as merge-sort [2]) is an efficient, general-purpose, and comparison-based sorting algorithm.Most implementations produce a stable sort, which means that the relative order of equal elements is the same in the input and output.
A list containing a single element is, by definition, sorted. Repeatedly merge sublists to create a new sorted sublist until the single list contains all elements. The single list is the sorted list. The merge algorithm is used repeatedly in the merge sort algorithm. An example merge sort is given in the illustration.
Sorting a set of unlabelled weights by weight using only a balance scale requires a comparison sort algorithm. A comparison sort is a type of sorting algorithm that only reads the list elements through a single abstract comparison operation (often a "less than or equal to" operator or a three-way comparison) that determines which of two elements should occur first in the final sorted list.