Merge Sort
Learn about merge sort, a divide-and-conquer algorithm, which breaks items into smaller elements until sorting them becomes really simple.
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Big-O Runtime for Merge Sort
Big-O Runtime for Merge Sort
The Merge Sort algorithm is divided into two parts. The first part repeatedly splits the input list into smaller lists to eventually produce single-element lists. The best, worst and average runtime for this part is Θ(log N). The second part repeatedly merges and sorts the single-element lists to twice its size until the original input size is achieved. The best, worst and average runtime for this part is Θ(N). Therefore, the combined runtime is Θ(N log N).
- 1Merge sort is a sorting algorithm created by John von Neumann in 1945. Merge sort’s “killer app” was the strategy that breaks the list-to-be-sorted into smaller parts, sometimes called a _divide-an…
- 2Merge sorting takes two steps: splitting the data into “runs” or smaller components, and the re-combining those runs into sorted lists (the “merge”). When splitting the data, we divide the input t…
- 4Merge sort was unique for its time in that the best, worst, and average time complexity are all the same: Θ(N*log(N)). This means an almost-sorted list will take the same amount of time as a comple…
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