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In
computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...
, a sorting algorithm is an
algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...
that puts elements of a
list A ''list'' is any set of items in a row. List or lists may also refer to: People * List (surname) Organizations * List College, an undergraduate division of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America * SC Germania List, German rugby unio ...
into an order. The most frequently used orders are numerical order and lexicographical order, and either ascending or descending. Efficient sorting is important for optimizing the efficiency of other algorithms (such as search and
merge Merge, merging, or merger may refer to: Concepts * Merge (traffic), the reduction of the number of lanes on a road * Merge (linguistics), a basic syntactic operation in generative syntax in the Minimalist Program * Merger (politics), the comb ...
algorithms) that require input data to be in sorted lists. Sorting is also often useful for canonicalizing data and for producing human-readable output. Formally, the output of any sorting algorithm must satisfy two conditions: # The output is in
monotonic In mathematics, a monotonic function (or monotone function) is a function between ordered sets that preserves or reverses the given order. This concept first arose in calculus, and was later generalized to the more abstract setting of ord ...
order (each element is no smaller/larger than the previous element, according to the required order). # The output is a permutation (a reordering, yet retaining all of the original elements) of the input. For optimum efficiency, the input data should be stored in a data structure which allows random access rather than one that allows only
sequential access Sequential access is a term describing a group of elements (such as data in a memory array or a disk file or on magnetic tape data storage) being accessed in a predetermined, ordered sequence. It is the opposite of random access, the ability to ...
.


History and concepts

From the beginning of computing, the sorting problem has attracted a great deal of research, perhaps due to the complexity of solving it efficiently despite its simple, familiar statement. Among the authors of early sorting algorithms around 1951 was
Betty Holberton Frances Elizabeth Holberton (March 7, 1917 – December 8, 2001) was an American computer scientist who was one of the six original programmers of the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, ENIAC. The other five ENIAC programmers wer ...
, who worked on
ENIAC ENIAC (; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. There were other computers that had these features, but the ENIAC had all of them in one pac ...
and
UNIVAC UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company an ...
. Bubble sort was analyzed as early as 1956. Asymptotically optimal algorithms have been known since the mid-20th century new algorithms are still being invented, with the widely used Timsort dating to 2002, and the library sort being first published in 2006. Comparison sorting algorithms have a fundamental requirement of Ω(''n'' log ''n'') comparisons (some input sequences will require a multiple of ''n'' log ''n'' comparisons, where n is the number of elements in the array to be sorted). Algorithms not based on comparisons, such as
counting sort In computer science, counting sort is an algorithm for sorting a collection of objects according to keys that are small positive integers; that is, it is an integer sorting algorithm. It operates by counting the number of objects that possess dis ...
, can have better performance. Sorting algorithms are prevalent in introductory
computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...
classes, where the abundance of algorithms for the problem provides a gentle introduction to a variety of core algorithm concepts, such as big O notation,
divide-and-conquer algorithm In computer science, divide and conquer is an algorithm design paradigm. A divide-and-conquer algorithm recursively breaks down a problem into two or more sub-problems of the same or related type, until these become simple enough to be solved dire ...
s, data structures such as heaps and binary trees, randomized algorithms,
best, worst and average case In computer science, best, worst, and average cases of a given algorithm express what the resource usage is ''at least'', ''at most'' and ''on average'', respectively. Usually the resource being considered is running time, i.e. time complexity, b ...
analysis, time–space tradeoffs, and upper and lower bounds. Sorting small arrays optimally (in fewest comparisons and swaps) or fast (i.e. taking into account machine specific details) is still an open research problem, with solutions only known for very small arrays (<20 elements). Similarly optimal (by various definitions) sorting on a parallel machine is an open research topic.


Classification

Sorting algorithms can be classified by: * Computational complexity **
Best, worst and average case In computer science, best, worst, and average cases of a given algorithm express what the resource usage is ''at least'', ''at most'' and ''on average'', respectively. Usually the resource being considered is running time, i.e. time complexity, b ...
behavior in terms of the size of the list. For typical serial sorting algorithms, good behavior is O(''n'' log ''n''), with parallel sort in O(log2 ''n''), and bad behavior is O(''n''2). Ideal behavior for a serial sort is O(''n''), but this is not possible in the average case. Optimal parallel sorting is O(log ''n''). ** Swaps for "in-place" algorithms. *
Memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered ...
usage (and use of other computer resources). In particular, some sorting algorithms are " in-place". Strictly, an in-place sort needs only O(1) memory beyond the items being sorted; sometimes O(log ''n'') additional memory is considered "in-place". * Recursion: Some algorithms are either recursive or non-recursive, while others may be both (e.g., merge sort). * Stability: stable sorting algorithms maintain the relative order of records with equal keys (i.e., values). * Whether or not they are a comparison sort. A comparison sort examines the data only by comparing two elements with a comparison operator. * General method: insertion, exchange, selection, merging, ''etc.'' Exchange sorts include bubble sort and quicksort. Selection sorts include cycle sort and heapsort. * Whether the algorithm is serial or parallel. The remainder of this discussion almost exclusively concentrates upon serial algorithms and assumes serial operation. * Adaptability: Whether or not the presortedness of the input affects the running time. Algorithms that take this into account are known to be
adaptive Adaptation, in biology, is the process or trait by which organisms or population better match their environment Adaptation may also refer to: Arts * Adaptation (arts), a transfer of a work of art from one medium to another ** Film adaptation, a ...
. * Online: An algorithm such as Insertion Sort that is online can sort a constant stream of input.


Stability

Stable sort algorithms sort equal elements in the same order that they appear in the input. For example, in the card sorting example to the right, the cards are being sorted by their rank, and their suit is being ignored. This allows the possibility of multiple different correctly sorted versions of the original list. Stable sorting algorithms choose one of these, according to the following rule: if two items compare as equal (like the two 5 cards), then their relative order will be preserved, i.e. if one comes before the other in the input, it will come before the other in the output. Stability is important to preserve order over multiple sorts on the same
data set A data set (or dataset) is a collection of data. In the case of tabular data, a data set corresponds to one or more database tables, where every column of a table represents a particular variable, and each row corresponds to a given record of the ...
. For example, say that student records consisting of name and class section are sorted dynamically, first by name, then by class section. If a stable sorting algorithm is used in both cases, the sort-by-class-section operation will not change the name order; with an unstable sort, it could be that sorting by section shuffles the name order, resulting in a nonalphabetical list of students. More formally, the data being sorted can be represented as a record or tuple of values, and the part of the data that is used for sorting is called the ''key''. In the card example, cards are represented as a record (rank, suit), and the key is the rank. 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. Stability is also not an issue if all keys are different. Unstable sorting algorithms can be specially implemented to be stable. One way of doing this is to artificially extend the key comparison, so that comparisons between two objects with otherwise equal keys are decided using the order of the entries in the original input list as a tie-breaker. Remembering this order, however, may require additional time and space. One application for stable sorting algorithms is sorting a list using a primary and secondary key. For example, suppose we wish to sort a hand of cards such that the suits are in the order clubs (♣), diamonds (), hearts (), spades (♠), and within each suit, the cards are sorted by rank. This can be done by first sorting the cards by rank (using any sort), and then doing a stable sort by suit: Within each suit, the stable sort preserves the ordering by rank that was already done. This idea can be extended to any number of keys and is utilised by
radix sort In computer science, radix sort is a non-comparative sorting algorithm. It avoids comparison by creating and distributing elements into buckets according to their radix. For elements with more than one significant digit, this bucketing process i ...
. The same effect can be achieved with an unstable sort by using a lexicographic key comparison, which, e.g., compares first by suit, and then compares by rank if the suits are the same.


Comparison of algorithms

In these tables, is the number of records to be sorted. The columns "Best", "Average" and "Worst" give the
time complexity In computer science, the time complexity is the computational complexity that describes the amount of computer time it takes to run an algorithm. Time complexity is commonly estimated by counting the number of elementary operations performed by t ...
in each case, under the assumption that the length of each key is constant, and therefore that all comparisons, swaps and other operations can proceed in constant time. "Memory" denotes the amount of extra storage needed additionally to that used by the list itself, under the same assumption. The run times and the memory requirements listed are inside big O notation, hence the base of the logarithms does not matter. The notation means .


Comparison sorts

Below is a table of comparison sorts. A comparison sort cannot perform better than on average.


Non-comparison sorts

The following table describes
integer sorting In computer science, integer sorting is the algorithmic problem of sorting a collection of data values by integer keys. Algorithms designed for integer sorting may also often be applied to sorting problems in which the keys are floating point numb ...
algorithms and other sorting algorithms that are not comparison sorts. As such, they are not limited to ''Ω''(''n'' log ''n''). Complexities below assume items to be sorted, with keys of size , digit size , and the range of numbers to be sorted. Many of them are based on the assumption that the key size is large enough that all entries have unique key values, and hence that , where ≪ means "much less than". In the unit-cost random-access machine model, algorithms with running time of \scriptstyle n \cdot \frac, such as radix sort, still take time proportional to , because is limited to be not more than 2^\frac, and a larger number of elements to sort would require a bigger in order to store them in the memory.
Samplesort Samplesort is a sorting algorithm that is a divide and conquer algorithm often used in parallel processing systems. Conventional divide and conquer sorting algorithms partitions the array into sub-intervals or buckets. The buckets are then sorted in ...
can be used to parallelize any of the non-comparison sorts, by efficiently distributing data into several buckets and then passing down sorting to several processors, with no need to merge as buckets are already sorted between each other.


Others

Some algorithms are slow compared to those discussed above, such as the
bogosort In computer science, bogosort (also known as permutation sort, stupid sort, slowsort or bozosort) is a sorting algorithm based on the generate and test paradigm. The function successively generates permutations of its input until it finds one t ...
with unbounded run time and the stooge sort which has ''O''(''n''2.7) run time. These sorts are usually described for educational purposes in order to demonstrate how run time of algorithms is estimated. The following table describes some sorting algorithms that are impractical for real-life use in traditional software contexts due to extremely poor performance or specialized hardware requirements. Theoretical computer scientists have detailed other sorting algorithms that provide better than ''O''(''n'' log ''n'') time complexity assuming additional constraints, including: * Thorup's algorithm, a randomized algorithm for sorting keys from a domain of finite size, taking time and ''O''(''n'') space. * A randomized
integer sorting In computer science, integer sorting is the algorithmic problem of sorting a collection of data values by integer keys. Algorithms designed for integer sorting may also often be applied to sorting problems in which the keys are floating point numb ...
algorithm taking O\left(n \sqrt\right) expected time and ''O''(''n'') space. * One of the authers of the previously mentioned algorithm also claims to have discovered an algorithm taking O\left(n \sqrt\right) time and ''O''(''n'') space, sorting real numbers. Further claiming that, without any added assumptions on the input, it can be modified to achieve O\left(n \log n / \sqrt\right) time and ''O''(''n'') space.


Popular sorting algorithms

While there are a large number of sorting algorithms, in practical implementations a few algorithms predominate. Insertion sort is widely used for small data sets, while for large data sets an asymptotically efficient sort is used, primarily heapsort, merge sort, or quicksort. Efficient implementations generally use a
hybrid algorithm {{Unreferenced, date=May 2014 A hybrid algorithm is an algorithm that combines two or more other algorithms that solve the same problem, and is mostly used in programming languages like C++, either choosing one (depending on the data), or switching ...
, combining an asymptotically efficient algorithm for the overall sort with insertion sort for small lists at the bottom of a recursion. Highly tuned implementations use more sophisticated variants, such as Timsort (merge sort, insertion sort, and additional logic), used in Android,
Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...
, and
Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...
, and introsort (quicksort and heapsort), used (in variant forms) in some C++ sort implementations and in .NET. For more restricted data, such as numbers in a fixed interval, distribution sorts such as counting sort or radix sort are widely used. Bubble sort and variants are rarely used in practice, but are commonly found in teaching and theoretical discussions. When physically sorting objects (such as alphabetizing papers, tests or books) people intuitively generally use insertion sorts for small sets. For larger sets, people often first bucket, such as by initial letter, and multiple bucketing allows practical sorting of very large sets. Often space is relatively cheap, such as by spreading objects out on the floor or over a large area, but operations are expensive, particularly moving an object a large distance –
locality of reference In computer science, locality of reference, also known as the principle of locality, is the tendency of a processor to access the same set of memory locations repetitively over a short period of time. There are two basic types of reference localit ...
is important. Merge sorts are also practical for physical objects, particularly as two hands can be used, one for each list to merge, while other algorithms, such as heapsort or quicksort, are poorly suited for human use. Other algorithms, such as library sort, a variant of insertion sort that leaves spaces, are also practical for physical use.


Simple sorts

Two of the simplest sorts are insertion sort and selection sort, both of which are efficient on small data, due to low overhead, but not efficient on large data. Insertion sort is generally faster than selection sort in practice, due to fewer comparisons and good performance on almost-sorted data, and thus is preferred in practice, but selection sort uses fewer writes, and thus is used when write performance is a limiting factor.


Insertion sort

''
Insertion sort Insertion sort is a simple sorting algorithm that builds the final sorted array (or list) one item at a time by comparisons. It is much less efficient on large lists than more advanced algorithms such as quicksort, heapsort, or merge sort. Ho ...
'' 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 we put money in our wallet. In arrays, the new list and the remaining elements can share the array's space, but insertion is expensive, requiring shifting all following elements over by one.
Shellsort Shellsort, also known as Shell sort or Shell's method, is an in-place comparison sort. It can be seen as either a generalization of sorting by exchange (bubble sort) or sorting by insertion ( insertion sort). The method starts by sorting pairs of ...
is a variant of insertion sort that is more efficient for larger lists.


Selection sort

''Selection sort'' is an in-place comparison sort. It has O(''n''2) complexity, making it inefficient on large lists, and generally performs worse than the similar
insertion sort Insertion sort is a simple sorting algorithm that builds the final sorted array (or list) one item at a time by comparisons. It is much less efficient on large lists than more advanced algorithms such as quicksort, heapsort, or merge sort. Ho ...
. Selection sort is noted for its simplicity, and also has performance advantages over more complicated algorithms in certain situations. The algorithm finds the minimum value, swaps it with the value in the first position, and repeats these steps for the remainder of the list. It does no more than ''n'' swaps, and thus is useful where swapping is very expensive.


Efficient sorts

Practical general sorting algorithms are almost always based on an algorithm with average time complexity (and generally worst-case complexity) O(''n'' log ''n''), of which the most common are heapsort, merge sort, and quicksort. Each has advantages and drawbacks, with the most significant being that simple implementation of merge sort uses O(''n'') additional space, and simple implementation of quicksort has O(''n''2) worst-case complexity. These problems can be solved or ameliorated at the cost of a more complex algorithm. While these algorithms are asymptotically efficient on random data, for practical efficiency on real-world data various modifications are used. First, the overhead of these algorithms becomes significant on smaller data, so often a hybrid algorithm is used, commonly switching to insertion sort once the data is small enough. Second, the algorithms often perform poorly on already sorted data or almost sorted data – these are common in real-world data, and can be sorted in O(''n'') time by appropriate algorithms. Finally, they may also be
unstable In numerous fields of study, the component of instability within a system is generally characterized by some of the outputs or internal states growing without bounds. Not all systems that are not stable are unstable; systems can also be mar ...
, and stability is often a desirable property in a sort. Thus more sophisticated algorithms are often employed, such as Timsort (based on merge sort) or introsort (based on quicksort, falling back to heapsort).


Merge sort

''Merge sort'' takes advantage of the ease of merging already sorted lists into a new sorted list. It starts by comparing every two elements (i.e., 1 with 2, then 3 with 4...) and swapping them if the first should come after the second. It then merges each of the resulting lists of two into lists of four, then merges those lists of four, and so on; until at last two lists are merged into the final sorted list. Of the algorithms described here, this is the first that scales well to very large lists, because its worst-case running time is O(''n'' log ''n''). It is also easily applied to lists, not only arrays, as it only requires sequential access, not random access. However, it has additional O(''n'') space complexity, and involves a large number of copies in simple implementations. Merge sort has seen a relatively recent surge in popularity for practical implementations, due to its use in the sophisticated algorithm Timsort, which is used for the standard sort routine in the programming languages
Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...
and
Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...
(as of JDK7). Merge sort itself is the standard routine in
Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...
, among others, and has been used in Java at least since 2000 in JDK1.3.Merge sort in Java 1.3
Sun.


Heapsort

''Heapsort'' is a much more efficient version of
selection sort In computer science, selection sort is an in-place comparison sorting algorithm. It has an O(''n''2) time complexity, which makes it inefficient on large lists, and generally performs worse than the similar insertion sort. Selection sort is no ...
. It also works by determining the largest (or smallest) element of the list, placing that at the end (or beginning) of the list, then continuing with the rest of the list, but accomplishes this task efficiently by using a data structure called a heap, a special type of binary tree. Once the data list has been made into a heap, the root node is guaranteed to be the largest (or smallest) element. When it is removed and placed at the end of the list, the heap is rearranged so the largest element remaining moves to the root. Using the heap, finding the next largest element takes O(log ''n'') time, instead of O(''n'') for a linear scan as in simple selection sort. This allows Heapsort to run in O(''n'' log ''n'') time, and this is also the worst case complexity.


Quicksort

''Quicksort'' is a
divide-and-conquer algorithm In computer science, divide and conquer is an algorithm design paradigm. A divide-and-conquer algorithm recursively breaks down a problem into two or more sub-problems of the same or related type, until these become simple enough to be solved dire ...
which relies on a ''partition'' operation: to partition an array, an element called a ''pivot'' is selected. All elements smaller than the pivot are moved before it and all greater elements are moved after it. This can be done efficiently in linear time and in-place. The lesser and greater sublists are then recursively sorted. This yields average time complexity of O(''n'' log ''n''), with low overhead, and thus this is a popular algorithm. Efficient implementations of quicksort (with in-place partitioning) are typically unstable sorts and somewhat complex, but are among the fastest sorting algorithms in practice. Together with its modest O(log ''n'') space usage, quicksort is one of the most popular sorting algorithms and is available in many standard programming libraries. The important caveat about quicksort is that its worst-case performance is O(''n''2); while this is rare, in naive implementations (choosing the first or last element as pivot) this occurs for sorted data, which is a common case. The most complex issue in quicksort is thus choosing a good pivot element, as consistently poor choices of pivots can result in drastically slower O(''n''2) performance, but good choice of pivots yields O(''n'' log ''n'') performance, which is asymptotically optimal. For example, if at each step the median is chosen as the pivot then the algorithm works in O(''n'' log ''n''). Finding the median, such as by the
median of medians In computer science, the median of medians is an approximate (median) selection algorithm, frequently used to supply a good pivot for an exact selection algorithm, mainly the quickselect, that selects the ''k''th smallest element of an initially u ...
selection algorithm is however an O(''n'') operation on unsorted lists and therefore exacts significant overhead with sorting. In practice choosing a random pivot almost certainly yields O(''n'' log ''n'') performance. If a guarantee of O(''n'' log ''n'') performance is important, there is a simple modification to achieve that. The idea, due to Musser, is to set a limit on the maximum depth of recursion. If that limit is exceeded, then sorting is continued using the heapsort algorithm. Musser proposed that the limit should be 1 + 2 \lfloor \log_2(n) \rfloor, which is approximately twice the maximum recursion depth one would expect on average with a randomly ordered array.


Shellsort

''Shellsort'' was invented by Donald Shell in 1959. It improves upon insertion sort by moving out of order elements more than one position at a time. The concept behind Shellsort is that insertion sort performs in time, where k is the greatest distance between two out-of-place elements. This means that generally, they perform in ''O''(''n''2), but for data that is mostly sorted, with only a few elements out of place, they perform faster. So, by first sorting elements far away, and progressively shrinking the gap between the elements to sort, the final sort computes much faster. One implementation can be described as arranging the data sequence in a two-dimensional array and then sorting the columns of the array using insertion sort. The worst-case time complexity of Shellsort is an open problem and depends on the gap sequence used, with known complexities ranging from ''O''(''n''2) to ''O''(''n''4/3) and Θ(''n'' log2 ''n''). This, combined with the fact that Shellsort is in-place, only needs a relatively small amount of code, and does not require use of the
call stack In computer science, a call stack is a stack data structure that stores information about the active subroutines of a computer program. This kind of stack is also known as an execution stack, program stack, control stack, run-time stack, or m ...
, makes it is useful in situations where memory is at a premium, such as in
embedded system An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is ''embedded'' ...
s and operating system kernels.


Bubble sort and variants

Bubble sort, and variants such as the Comb sort and cocktail sort, are simple, highly inefficient sorting algorithms. They are frequently seen in introductory texts due to ease of analysis, but they are rarely used in practice.


Bubble sort

''Bubble sort'' is a simple sorting algorithm. The algorithm starts at the beginning of the data set. It compares the first two elements, and if the first is greater than the second, it swaps them. It continues doing this for each pair of adjacent elements to the end of the data set. It then starts again with the first two elements, repeating until no swaps have occurred on the last pass. This algorithm's average time and worst-case performance is O(''n''2), so it is rarely used to sort large, unordered data sets. Bubble sort can be used to sort a small number of items (where its asymptotic inefficiency is not a high penalty). Bubble sort can also be used efficiently on a list of any length that is nearly sorted (that is, the elements are not significantly out of place). For example, if any number of elements are out of place by only one position (e.g. 0123546789 and 1032547698), bubble sort's exchange will get them in order on the first pass, the second pass will find all elements in order, so the sort will take only 2''n'' time.


Comb sort

''Comb sort'' is a relatively simple sorting algorithm based on bubble sort and originally designed by Włodzimierz Dobosiewicz in 1980. It was later rediscovered and popularized by Stephen Lacey and Richard Box with a ''Byte'' Magazine article published in April 1991. The basic idea is to eliminate ''turtles'', or small values near the end of the list, since in a bubble sort these slow the sorting down tremendously. (''Rabbits'', large values around the beginning of the list, do not pose a problem in bubble sort) It accomplishes this by initially swapping elements that are a certain distance from one another in the array, rather than only swapping elements if they are adjacent to one another, and then shrinking the chosen distance until it is operating as a normal bubble sort. Thus, if Shellsort can be thought of as a generalized version of insertion sort that swaps elements spaced a certain distance away from one another, comb sort can be thought of as the same generalization applied to bubble sort.


Exchange sort

''Exchange sort'' is sometimes confused with bubble sort, although the algorithms are in fact distinct. Exchange sort works by comparing the first element with all elements above it, swapping where needed, thereby guaranteeing that the first element is correct for the final sort order; it then proceeds to do the same for the second element, and so on. It lacks the advantage which bubble sort has of detecting in one pass if the list is already sorted, but it can be faster than bubble sort by a constant factor (one less pass over the data to be sorted; half as many total comparisons) in worst case situations. Like any simple O(''n''2) sort it can be reasonably fast over very small data sets, though in general
insertion sort Insertion sort is a simple sorting algorithm that builds the final sorted array (or list) one item at a time by comparisons. It is much less efficient on large lists than more advanced algorithms such as quicksort, heapsort, or merge sort. Ho ...
will be faster.


Distribution sorts

''Distribution sort'' refers to any sorting algorithm where data is distributed from their input to multiple intermediate structures which are then gathered and placed on the output. For example, both
bucket sort Bucket sort, or bin sort, is a sorting algorithm that works by distributing the elements of an array into a number of buckets. Each bucket is then sorted individually, either using a different sorting algorithm, or by recursively applying the b ...
and
flashsort Flashsort is a distribution sorting algorithm showing linear computational complexity for uniformly distributed data sets and relatively little additional memory requirement. The original work was published in 1998 by Karl-Dietrich Neubert. Co ...
are distribution based sorting algorithms. Distribution sorting algorithms can be used on a single processor, or they can be a
distributed algorithm A distributed algorithm is an algorithm designed to run on computer hardware constructed from interconnected processors. Distributed algorithms are used in different application areas of distributed computing, such as telecommunications, scientific ...
, where individual subsets are separately sorted on different processors, then combined. This allows
external sorting External sorting is a class of sorting algorithms that can handle massive amounts of data. External sorting is required when the data being sorted do not fit into the main memory of a computing device (usually RAM) and instead they must reside in t ...
of data too large to fit into a single computer's memory.


Counting sort

Counting sort is applicable when each input is known to belong to a particular set, ''S'', of possibilities. The algorithm runs in O(, ''S'', + ''n'') time and O(, ''S'', ) memory where ''n'' is the length of the input. It works by creating an integer array of size , ''S'', and using the ''i''th bin to count the occurrences of the ''i''th member of ''S'' in the input. Each input is then counted by incrementing the value of its corresponding bin. Afterward, the counting array is looped through to arrange all of the inputs in order. This sorting algorithm often cannot be used because ''S'' needs to be reasonably small for the algorithm to be efficient, but it is extremely fast and demonstrates great asymptotic behavior as ''n'' increases. It also can be modified to provide stable behavior.


Bucket sort

Bucket sort is a divide-and-conquer sorting algorithm that generalizes
counting sort In computer science, counting sort is an algorithm for sorting a collection of objects according to keys that are small positive integers; that is, it is an integer sorting algorithm. It operates by counting the number of objects that possess dis ...
by partitioning an array into a finite number of buckets. Each bucket is then sorted individually, either using a different sorting algorithm, or by recursively applying the bucket sorting algorithm. A bucket sort works best when the elements of the data set are evenly distributed across all buckets.


Radix sort

''Radix sort'' is an algorithm that sorts numbers by processing individual digits. ''n'' numbers consisting of ''k'' digits each are sorted in O(''n'' · ''k'') time. Radix sort can process digits of each number either starting from the least significant digit (LSD) or starting from the
most significant digit Significant figures (also known as the significant digits, ''precision'' or ''resolution'') of a number in positional notation are digits in the number that are reliable and necessary to indicate the quantity of something. If a number expres ...
(MSD). The LSD algorithm first sorts the list by the least significant digit while preserving their relative order using a stable sort. Then it sorts them by the next digit, and so on from the least significant to the most significant, ending up with a sorted list. While the LSD radix sort requires the use of a stable sort, the MSD radix sort algorithm does not (unless stable sorting is desired). In-place MSD radix sort is not stable. It is common for the
counting sort In computer science, counting sort is an algorithm for sorting a collection of objects according to keys that are small positive integers; that is, it is an integer sorting algorithm. It operates by counting the number of objects that possess dis ...
algorithm to be used internally by the radix sort. A hybrid sorting approach, such as using
insertion sort Insertion sort is a simple sorting algorithm that builds the final sorted array (or list) one item at a time by comparisons. It is much less efficient on large lists than more advanced algorithms such as quicksort, heapsort, or merge sort. Ho ...
for small bins, improves performance of radix sort significantly.


Memory usage patterns and index sorting

When the size of the array to be sorted approaches or exceeds the available primary memory, so that (much slower) disk or swap space must be employed, the memory usage pattern of a sorting algorithm becomes important, and an algorithm that might have been fairly efficient when the array fit easily in RAM may become impractical. In this scenario, the total number of comparisons becomes (relatively) less important, and the number of times sections of memory must be copied or swapped to and from the disk can dominate the performance characteristics of an algorithm. Thus, the number of passes and the localization of comparisons can be more important than the raw number of comparisons, since comparisons of nearby elements to one another happen at system bus speed (or, with caching, even at CPU speed), which, compared to disk speed, is virtually instantaneous. For example, the popular recursive
quicksort Quicksort is an efficient, general-purpose sorting algorithm. Quicksort was developed by British computer scientist Tony Hoare in 1959 and published in 1961, it is still a commonly used algorithm for sorting. Overall, it is slightly faster than ...
algorithm provides quite reasonable performance with adequate RAM, but due to the recursive way that it copies portions of the array it becomes much less practical when the array does not fit in RAM, because it may cause a number of slow copy or move operations to and from disk. In that scenario, another algorithm may be preferable even if it requires more total comparisons. One way to work around this problem, which works well when complex records (such as in a relational database) are being sorted by a relatively small key field, is to create an index into the array and then sort the index, rather than the entire array. (A sorted version of the entire array can then be produced with one pass, reading from the index, but often even that is unnecessary, as having the sorted index is adequate.) Because the index is much smaller than the entire array, it may fit easily in memory where the entire array would not, effectively eliminating the disk-swapping problem. This procedure is sometimes called "tag sort". Another technique for overcoming the memory-size problem is using
external sorting External sorting is a class of sorting algorithms that can handle massive amounts of data. External sorting is required when the data being sorted do not fit into the main memory of a computing device (usually RAM) and instead they must reside in t ...
, for example one of the ways is to combine two algorithms in a way that takes advantage of the strength of each to improve overall performance. For instance, the array might be subdivided into chunks of a size that will fit in RAM, the contents of each chunk sorted using an efficient algorithm (such as
quicksort Quicksort is an efficient, general-purpose sorting algorithm. Quicksort was developed by British computer scientist Tony Hoare in 1959 and published in 1961, it is still a commonly used algorithm for sorting. Overall, it is slightly faster than ...
), and the results merged using a ''k''-way merge similar to that used in
merge sort In computer science, merge sort (also commonly spelled as mergesort) is an efficient, general-purpose, and comparison-based sorting algorithm. Most implementations produce a stable sort, which means that the order of equal elements is the same ...
. This is faster than performing either merge sort or quicksort over the entire list. Ellis Horowitz and
Sartaj Sahni Professor Sartaj Kumar Sahni (born July 22, 1949, in Pune, India) is a computer scientist based in the United States, and is one of the pioneers in the field of data structures. He is a distinguished professor in the Department of Computer and I ...
, ''Fundamentals of Data Structures'', H. Freeman & Co., .
Techniques can also be combined. For sorting very large sets of data that vastly exceed system memory, even the index may need to be sorted using an algorithm or combination of algorithms designed to perform reasonably with
virtual memory In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a very ...
, i.e., to reduce the amount of swapping required.


Related algorithms

Related problems include approximate sorting (sorting a sequence to within a certain amount of the correct order), partial sorting (sorting only the ''k'' smallest elements of a list, or finding the ''k'' smallest elements, but unordered) and
selection Selection may refer to: Science * Selection (biology), also called natural selection, selection in evolution ** Sex selection, in genetics ** Mate selection, in mating ** Sexual selection in humans, in human sexuality ** Human mating strateg ...
(computing the ''k''th smallest element). These can be solved inefficiently by a total sort, but more efficient algorithms exist, often derived by generalizing a sorting algorithm. The most notable example is
quickselect In computer science, quickselect is a selection algorithm to find the ''k''th smallest element in an unordered list. It is also known as the kth order statistics . It is related to the quicksort sorting algorithm. Like quicksort, it was devel ...
, which is related to
quicksort Quicksort is an efficient, general-purpose sorting algorithm. Quicksort was developed by British computer scientist Tony Hoare in 1959 and published in 1961, it is still a commonly used algorithm for sorting. Overall, it is slightly faster than ...
. Conversely, some sorting algorithms can be derived by repeated application of a selection algorithm; quicksort and quickselect can be seen as the same pivoting move, differing only in whether one recurses on both sides (quicksort, divide-and-conquer) or one side (quickselect, decrease-and-conquer). A kind of opposite of a sorting algorithm is a shuffling algorithm. These are fundamentally different because they require a source of random numbers. Shuffling can also be implemented by a sorting algorithm, namely by a random sort: assigning a random number to each element of the list and then sorting based on the random numbers. This is generally not done in practice, however, and there is a well-known simple and efficient algorithm for shuffling: the Fisher–Yates shuffle. Sorting algorithms are ineffective for finding an order in many situations. Usually when elements have no reliable comparison function (crowdsourced preferences like
voting systems An electoral system or voting system is a set of rules that determine how elections and referendums are conducted and how their results are determined. Electoral systems are used in politics to elect governments, while non-political elections m ...
), comparisons are very costly (
sports Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators. Sports can, ...
), or when it would be impossible to pairwise compare all elements for all criteria ( search engines). In these cases, the problem is usually referred to as ''ranking'' and the goal is to find the "best" result for some criteria according to probabilities inferred from comparisons or rankings. A common example is in chess, where players are ranked with the
Elo rating system The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in zero-sum games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-American physics professor. The Elo system was invented as an improved c ...
, and rankings are determined by a tournament system instead of a sorting algorithm.


See also

* * K-sorted sequence *
Pairwise comparison Pairwise comparison generally is any process of comparing entities in pairs to judge which of each entity is preferred, or has a greater amount of some quantitative property, or whether or not the two entities are identical. The method of pairwi ...
* * *


References


Further reading

* *


External links

* .
Sequential and parallel sorting algorithms
– Explanations and analyses of many sorting algorithms.
Dictionary of Algorithms, Data Structures, and Problems
– Dictionary of algorithms, techniques, common functions, and problems.
Slightly Skeptical View on Sorting Algorithms
– Discusses several classic algorithms and promotes alternatives to the
quicksort Quicksort is an efficient, general-purpose sorting algorithm. Quicksort was developed by British computer scientist Tony Hoare in 1959 and published in 1961, it is still a commonly used algorithm for sorting. Overall, it is slightly faster than ...
algorithm.
15 Sorting Algorithms in 6 Minutes (Youtube)
– Visualization and "audibilization" of 15 Sorting Algorithms in 6 Minutes.
A036604 sequence in OEIS database titled "Sorting numbers: minimal number of comparisons needed to sort n elements"
– Performed by Ford–Johnson algorithm.
Sorting Algorithms Used on Famous Paintings (Youtube)
– Visualization of Sorting Algorithms on Many Famous Paintings.
A Comparison of Sorting Algorithms
– Runs a series of tests of 9 of the main sorting algorithms using Python timeit and Google Colab. {{sorting Data processing