I guess after such a long time you must have got an answer. But I am still providing some example links to help someone else who hits this question. NOTE: Before looking into this link you should have an idea about Heap data structure Take a look at Example of Two-Way Sorting and Example of … Read more
The first improvement would be to simplify the three cases in the main loop: Rather than iterating while some of the sequence has elements, iterate while both sequences have elements. When leaving the loop, one of them will be empty, we don’t know which, but we don’t care: We append them at the end of … Read more
MergeSort time Complexity is O(nlgn) which is a fundamental knowledge. Merge Sort space complexity will always be O(n) including with arrays. If you draw the space tree out, it will seem as though the space complexity is O(nlgn). However, as the code is a Depth First code, you will always only be expanding along one … Read more
Note this answer has been updated to address all of the issues mentioned in the comments below and after the question, by making the same change from an array of lists to an array of iterators, while retaining the faster bottom up merge sort algorithm, and eliminating the small chance of stack overflow due to … Read more
Wonder why it should be big challenge as it is stated here, here is a straightforward implementation in Java with out any “clever tricks”. //The main function public static Node merge_sort(Node head) { if(head == null || head.next == null) return head; Node middle = getMiddle(head); //get the middle of the list Node left_head = … Read more
Quick sort works well for sorting in-place. In particular, most of the operations can be defined in terms of swapping pairs of elements in an array. To do that, however, you normally “walk” through the array with two pointers (or indexes, etc.) One starts at the beginning of the array and the other at the … Read more
The Merge Sort use the Divide-and-Conquer approach to solve the sorting problem. First, it divides the input in half using recursion. After dividing, it sort the halfs and merge them into one sorted output. See the figure It means that is better to sort half of your problem first and do a simple merge subroutine. … Read more
The most likely reason: quicksort is not stable, i.e. equal entries can change their relative position during the sort; among other things, this means that if you sort an already sorted array, it may not stay unchanged. Since primitive types have no identity (there is no way to distinguish two ints with the same value), … Read more
Knuth left this as an exercise (Vol 3, 5.2.5). There do exist in-place merge sorts. They must be implemented carefully. First, naive in-place merge such as described here isn’t the right solution. It downgrades the performance to O(N2). The idea is to sort part of the array while using the rest as working area for … Read more
Quicksort has O(n2) worst-case runtime and O(nlogn) average case runtime. However, it’s superior to merge sort in many scenarios because many factors influence an algorithm’s runtime, and, when taking them all together, quicksort wins out. In particular, the often-quoted runtime of sorting algorithms refers to the number of comparisons or the number of swaps necessary … Read more