p (n log log n) Integer Sorting in O Expected Time and Linear Space Yijie Han Mikkel Thorup School of Interdisciplinary Computing and Engineering AT&T Labs— Research University of Missouri at Kansas City Shannon Laboratory 5100 Rockhill Road 180 Park Avenue Kansas City, MO 64110 Florham Park, NJ 07932
[email protected] [email protected] http://welcome.to/yijiehan Abstract of the input integers. The assumption that each integer fits in a machine word implies that integers can be operated on We present a randomized algorithm sorting n integers with single instructions. A similar assumption is made for p (n log log n) O (n log n) in O expected time and linear space. This comparison based sorting in that an time bound (n log log n) improves the previous O bound by Anderson et requires constant time comparisons. However, for integer al. from STOC’95. sorting, besides comparisons, we can use all the other in- As an immediate consequence, if the integers are structions available on integers in standard imperative pro- p O (n log log U ) bounded by U , we can sort them in gramming languages such as C [26]. It is important that the expected time. This is the first improvement over the word-size W is finite, for otherwise, we can sort in linear (n log log U ) O bound obtained with van Emde Boas’ data time by a clever coding of a huge vector-processor dealing structure from FOCS’75. with n input integers at the time [30, 27]. At the heart of our construction, is a technical determin- Concretely, Fredman and Willard [17] showed that we n (n log n= log log n) istic lemma of independent interest; namely, that we split can sort deterministically in O time and p p n (n log n) integers into subsets of size at most in linear time and linear space and randomized in O expected time space.