In a continuous-time setting, Fill (2012) proved, for a large class of probabilistic sources, that the number of symbol comparisons used by $\texttt{QuickSort}$, when centered by subtracting the mean and scaled by dividing by time, has a limiting distribution, but proved little about that limiting random variable $Y$—not even that it is nondegenerate. We establish the nondegeneracy of $Y$. The proof is perhaps surprisingly difficult.
Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science