Fragile Complexity of Comparison-Based Algorithms∗ Peyman Afshani Aarhus University, Denmark
[email protected] Rolf Fagerberg University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
[email protected] David Hammer Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
[email protected] Riko Jacob IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
[email protected] Irina Kostitsyna TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands
[email protected] Ulrich Meyer Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
[email protected] Manuel Penschuck Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
[email protected] Nodari Sitchinava University of Hawaii at Manoa
[email protected] Abstract We initiate a study of algorithms with a focus on the computational complexity of individual elements, and introduce the fragile complexity of comparison-based algorithms as the maximal number of comparisons any individual element takes part in. We give a number of upper and lower bounds on the fragile complexity for fundamental problems, including Minimum, Selection, Sorting and Heap Construction. The results include both deterministic and randomized upper and lower bounds, and demonstrate a separation between the two settings for a number of problems. The depth of a comparator network is a straight-forward upper bound on the worst case fragile complexity of the corresponding fragile algorithm. We prove that fragile complexity is a different and strictly easier property than the depth of comparator networks, in the sense that for some problems a fragile complexity equal