14. Merge Sort: Analysis
The chapter focuses on the divide and conquer strategy as exemplified by the merge sort algorithm, emphasizing its efficiency compared to traditional sorting methods such as insertion and selection sort. It explains how merge sort operates by recursively splitting and merging lists while analyzing the time complexity, demonstrating its optimal performance of O(n log n). Although merge sort offers significant improvement in speed for large datasets, it does come with drawbacks, including the requirement for additional memory and a recursive approach that can be less efficient in practice.
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What we have learnt
- Merge sort is a sorting algorithm that uses the divide and conquer strategy.
- The time complexity of merge sort is O(n log n), significantly better than O(n^2) for insertion and selection sorts.
- Merge operations can be adapted for union, intersection, and set difference of lists.
Key Concepts
- -- Merge Sort
- A sorting algorithm that splits an input list into smaller sublists, sorts those sublists, and then merges them back together into a sorted list.
- -- Time Complexity
- A computational complexity measure that describes the amount of time an algorithm takes to run as a function of the size of the input data.
- -- Divide and Conquer
- An algorithm design paradigm that breaks a problem down into smaller, more manageable subproblems and solves each subproblem independently.
- -- Merge Operation
- A process that combines two sorted lists into a single sorted list without losing elements.
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