Merge Strategies: from Merge Sort to TimSort Nicolas Auger, Cyril Nicaud, Carine Pivoteau To cite this version: Nicolas Auger, Cyril Nicaud, Carine Pivoteau. Merge Strategies: from Merge Sort to TimSort. 2015. hal-01212839v2 HAL Id: hal-01212839 https://hal-upec-upem.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01212839v2 Preprint submitted on 9 Dec 2015 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Merge Strategies: from Merge Sort to TimSort Nicolas Auger, Cyril Nicaud, and Carine Pivoteau Universit´eParis-Est, LIGM (UMR 8049), F77454 Marne-la-Vall´ee,France fauger,nicaud,
[email protected] Abstract. The introduction of TimSort as the standard algorithm for sorting in Java and Python questions the generally accepted idea that merge algorithms are not competitive for sorting in practice. In an at- tempt to better understand TimSort algorithm, we define a framework to study the merging cost of sorting algorithms that relies on merges of monotonic subsequences of the input. We design a simpler yet competi- tive algorithm in the spirit of TimSort based on the same kind of ideas. As a benefit, our framework allows to establish the announced running time of TimSort, that is, O(n log n).