When should Merge Sort be used as opposed to Quick Sort in an algorithm?
When should Merge Sort be used as opposed to Quick Sort in an
Merge Sort be used as opposed to Quick Sort in an algorithm?
Although merge sort and quicksort use the same divide-and-conquer idea, they approach partitioning and sorting in quite different ways.
Merge sort divides a list into two sub-lists of equal size (different in size by one when the list size is odd) and optimally merges the sorted sub-lists to generate a sorted list. Quicksort, on the other hand, does not always divide the list into equal-sized sub-lists. The partition sizes can be any size depending on how we choose the pivot.
We can also see that merge sort conducts all of the sortings during the merging process, whereas quicksort performs the majority of the sorting during the division step.
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