james Allen fill - Distributional Convergence for the Number of Symbol Comparisons Used by QuickSort (Extended Abstract)

dmtcs:2800 - Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science, January 1, 2010, DMTCS Proceedings vol. AM, 21st International Meeting on Probabilistic, Combinatorial, and Asymptotic Methods in the Analysis of Algorithms (AofA'10) - https://doi.org/10.46298/dmtcs.2800
Distributional Convergence for the Number of Symbol Comparisons Used by QuickSort (Extended Abstract)Article

Authors: james Allen fill

    Most previous studies of the sorting algorithm $\mathtt{QuickSort}$ have used the number of key comparisons as a measure of the cost of executing the algorithm. Here we suppose that the $n$ independent and identically distributed (iid) keys are each represented as a sequence of symbols from a probabilistic source and that $\mathtt{QuickSort}$ operates on individual symbols, and we measure the execution cost as the number of symbol comparisons. Assuming only a mild "tameness'' condition on the source, we show that there is a limiting distribution for the number of symbol comparisons after normalization: first centering by the mean and then dividing by $n$. Additionally, under a condition that grows more restrictive as $p$ increases, we have convergence of moments of orders $p$ and smaller. In particular, we have convergence in distribution and convergence of moments of every order whenever the source is memoryless, i.e., whenever each key is generated as an infinite string of iid symbols. This is somewhat surprising: Even for the classical model that each key is an iid string of unbiased ("fair'') bits, the mean exhibits periodic fluctuations of order $n$.


    Volume: DMTCS Proceedings vol. AM, 21st International Meeting on Probabilistic, Combinatorial, and Asymptotic Methods in the Analysis of Algorithms (AofA'10)
    Section: Proceedings
    Published on: January 1, 2010
    Imported on: January 31, 2017
    Keywords: coupling,QuickSort,symbol comparisons,distributional convergence,probabilistic source,tameness,[INFO.INFO-DS] Computer Science [cs]/Data Structures and Algorithms [cs.DS],[MATH.MATH-CO] Mathematics [math]/Combinatorics [math.CO],[INFO.INFO-DM] Computer Science [cs]/Discrete Mathematics [cs.DM],[INFO.INFO-CG] Computer Science [cs]/Computational Geometry [cs.CG]

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