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:
“It is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of “quaint,” and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects Man can’t touch.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)