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Quicksort is an efficient, general-purpose sorting algorithm. Quicksort was developed by British computer scientist Tony Hoare in 1959 [1] and published in 1961. [2] It is still a commonly used algorithm for sorting. Overall, it is slightly faster than merge sort and heapsort for randomized data, particularly on larger distributions. [3]
Highly tuned implementations use more sophisticated variants, such as Timsort (merge sort, insertion sort, and additional logic), used in Android, Java, and Python, and introsort (quicksort and heapsort), used (in variant forms) in some C++ sort implementations and in .NET.
Quickselect uses the same overall approach as quicksort, choosing one element as a pivot and partitioning the data in two based on the pivot, accordingly as less than or greater than the pivot. However, instead of recursing into both sides, as in quicksort, quickselect only recurses into one side – the side with the element it is searching for.
A popular choice to implement this algorithm scheme is to combine quickselect and quicksort; the result is sometimes called "quickselsort". [1] Common in current (as of 2022) C++ STL implementations is a pass of heapselect for a list of k elements, followed by a heapsort for the final result. [2]
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.
Merge sort is more efficient than quicksort for some types of lists if the data to be sorted can only be efficiently accessed sequentially, and is thus popular in languages such as Lisp, where sequentially accessed data structures are very common. Unlike some (efficient) implementations of quicksort, merge sort is a stable sort.
The divide-and-conquer technique is the basis of efficient algorithms for many problems, such as sorting (e.g., quicksort, merge sort), multiplying large numbers (e.g., the Karatsuba algorithm), finding the closest pair of points, syntactic analysis (e.g., top-down parsers), and computing the discrete Fourier transform . [1]
Python's standard library includes heapq.nsmallest and heapq.nlargest functions for returning the smallest or largest elements from a collection, in sorted order. The implementation maintains a binary heap, limited to holding elements, and initialized to the first elements in the collection. Then, each subsequent item of the collection may ...