On Monday, 15 October 2012 at 09:18:12 UTC, Era Scarecrow wrote:
Been watching online lectures that's going into sorting and searching, and from what I'm seeing most sorting algorithms (by using comparison; merge sort, quicksort, etc) and even tree algorithms peak at O(n log n). So an example area to be sorted with 16 elements would take on average about 100 compares while theoretically you can do it in half that number.
Big-O notation doesn't give you actual numbers, O(n) = O(25*n). If you're interested in a practical method, look at TimSort and similar ones that combine different algorithms.
