Paper by Erik D. Demaine

Reference:

Therese Biedl, Timothy Chan, Erik D. Demaine, Rudolf Fleischer, Mordecai Golin, and J. Ian Munro, “Fun-Sort”, Technical Report HKUST-TCSC-2001-03, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, February 2001.

Abstract:

In this paper we study greedy in-place sorting algorithms which miraculously happen to work in reasonable time. Dumb-Sort which repeatedly compares all possible pairs of array cells sorts n elements in n − 1 cycles, or time O(n³). Not-So-Dumb-Sort, which only tests adjacent cells, also sorts in n − 1 cycles, or in time O(n²). Guess-Sort, a randomized version of Dumb-Sort, runs in expected time O(n² log n). And Fun-Sort, an in-place variant of Insertion-Sort that performs repeated insertions by binary search into an initially unsorted array, sorts in time O(n² log n).

Length:

The paper is 12 pages.

Availability:

The paper is available in PostScript (189k) and gzipped PostScript (75k).

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Related papers:

FunSort_DAM (Fun-Sort—or the Chaos of Unordered Binary Search)

FUN2001 (Fun-Sort)