Pattern-defeating Quicksort¶
Authors: Orson R. L. Peters
Published: 2021 ()
Algorithm: pdqsort
arXiv: 2106.05123
Summary¶
Abstract¶
A new solution for the Dutch national flag problem is proposed, requiring no three-way comparisons, which gives quicksort a proper worst-case runtime of $O(nk)$ for inputs with $k$ distinct elements. This is used together with other known and novel techniques to construct a hybrid sort that is never significantly slower than regular quicksort while speeding up drastically for many input distributions.