Question

The wikipedia article for merge sort.

The wikipedia article for quick sort.

Both articles have excellent visualizations.

Both have n*log(n) complexity.

So obviously the distribution of the data will effect the speed of the sort. My guess would be that since a comparison can just as quickly compare any two values, no matter their spread, the range of data values does not matter.

More importantly one should consider the lateral distribution (x direction ) with respect to ordering (magnitude removed).

A good test case to consider would be if the test data had some level of sorting…

Answer 1

While Java 6 and earlier versions use merge sort as the sorting algorithms, C# uses QuickSort as the sorting algorithm.

QuickSort performs better than merge sort even though they are both O(nlogn). QuickSort’s has a smaller constant than merge sort.