Natural Merge Sort
A natural merge sort is similar to a bottom up merge sort except that any naturally occurring runs (sorted sequences) in the input are exploited. In the bottom up merge sort, the starting point assumes each run is one item long. In practice, random input data will have many short runs that just happen to be sorted. In the typical case, the natural merge sort may not need as many passes because there are fewer runs to merge. For example, in the best case, the input is already sorted (i.e., is one run), so the natural merge sort need only make one pass through the data.
Read more about this topic: Merge Sort
Famous quotes containing the words natural, merge and/or sort:
“Your child should feel entitled to cry when you leave; crying is a natural thing for a child to do when she feels bad. The fact that your child cries when you go doesn’t mean she will never like day care. It just means she wants you to stay.”
—Amy Laura Dombro (20th century)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“A Spirit free, to choose for my own share,
What sort of Flesh and Blood I pleas’d to wear,
I’d be a Dog, a Monkey or a Bear,
Or any thing, but that vain Animal,
Who is so proud of being rational.”
—John Wilmot, 2d Earl Of Rochester (1647–1680)