Like the Quick Sort, the Merge Sort uses a divide and conquer method to help sort the data. In a given array, you start to subdivide your array into smaller arrays, sorting the data as you go along, only to merge it back together when you are done. The way you sort the data is…
While the Quicksort is relatively fast, O(nlog(n)) in terms of speed on average, a lot of programmers fear it because they don’t like, understand, or maybe even know about recursion. Recursion is the process of a function calling itself. There is usually a slight penalty for recursion as each function call is slower than if…
The bubble sort is one of the simplest sorts you can write, from a developer’s perspective. Unfortunately, it is one of the slowest to run from the computer’s perspective. A Bubble Sort works on the following idea. Given a list of values, start at the top value, and look at the next value. If the…
Now the idea behind weighted search is nice, but it is complicated, requires several extra calculation steps, and can cause other issues. In a Database, you might have heard about indexing. The idea of finding a way to store a subset of your table which means faster searching. Of course, if you are looking through…
When working with a very large list of items, you might want to use a weighted search. One where instead of jumping to the middle, you try to get closer to your choice. Consider you had list with values between 1 and 10,000,000, and you were looking for an item with a value of 8,536,324….
If our data is presorted then a binary search starts to make a lot of sense. It is like the guessing game we mentioned earlier where you need to find a number between 1 and 100. No one asks for 1 then 2 then 3… until they find it. Instead we ask for the mid…
A brute force method of searching is slow and inefficient from a run-time perspective. However, it is relatively fast to write. With a brute force search, you scan through every item in a list until you find the element. As you can imagine, scanning through every item can be a time consuming process, especially if…
