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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.
An example of such is the classic merge that appears frequently in merge sort examples. The classic merge outputs the data item with the lowest key at each step; given some sorted lists, it produces a sorted list containing all the elements in any of the input lists, and it does so in time proportional to the sum of the lengths of the input lists.
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.
Insertion sort is a simple sorting algorithm that is relatively efficient for small lists and mostly sorted lists, and is often used as part of more sophisticated algorithms. It works by taking elements from the list one by one and inserting them in their correct position into a new sorted list similar to how one puts money in their wallet. [22]
External sorting algorithms generally fall into two types, distribution sorting, which resembles quicksort, and external merge sort, which resembles merge sort. External merge sort typically uses a hybrid sort-merge strategy. In the sorting phase, chunks of data small enough to fit in main memory are read, sorted, and written out to a temporary ...
Problems of sufficient simplicity are solved directly. For example, to sort a given list of n natural numbers, split it into two lists of about n/2 numbers each, sort each of them in turn, and interleave both results appropriately to obtain the sorted version of the given list (see the picture). This approach is known as the merge sort algorithm.
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. The algorithm finds subsequences of the data that are already ordered (runs) and uses them to sort the ...
Block sort, or block merge sort, is a sorting algorithm combining at least two merge operations with an insertion sort to arrive at O(n log n) (see Big O notation) in-place stable sorting time. It gets its name from the observation that merging two sorted lists, A and B , is equivalent to breaking A into evenly sized blocks , inserting each A ...