Comments on: Ruby Sort

By: kahfei » My sort of sort

kahfei » My sort of sort — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:12:30 +0000

[...] I read from Renae’s blog that they are using paper cutouts, while I have been sketching and sketching and sketching trying [...]

By: Dennis Tecyedics

Dennis Tecyedics — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:27:34 +0000

First of all congratulation for such a great site. I learned a lot reading article here today. I will make sure i visit this site once a day so i can learn more.

By: renaebair

renaebair — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 03:42:53 +0000

Thanks guys that makes a lot of sense! I tried benchmarking at 1 million times but I never thought to try the benchmark with a significantly larger array.

By: Nimai Etheridge

Nimai Etheridge — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:14:16 +0000

Also the merge sort you are using, uses recursion which unless you’re using a language which optimises for recursion is generally a lot slower and more memory intensive than using a iterator based method, especially as you grow your selection size.

By: Jacob Atzen

Jacob Atzen — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:40:57 +0000

In regard to why merge sort is slower than insertion sort. The average time of O(n^2) and O(n*log(n)) does not mean that the first is always slower than the second. It just means that for sufficiently large n it will be slower. Try growing n and see what happens, at some point merge sort should become faster than insertion sort.