Abstrait

Hardware Solution to Sorting Algorithms: A Review

Rouf Ali

Sorting algorithms rearrange data items/elements of an array/data list in a certain order, either in ascending order or descending order with numerical data, alphabetically with character data and chronologically with the date data type. There are several programming applications used in computer science that apply sorting techniques. There are two types of sorting algorithms. Comparison based algorithms and non-comparison based algorithms. In a comparison-based sorting algorithm, elements of an array are compared with each other to determine which of two elements should occur first in the final sorted list. The best comparison-based sorting algorithms have a complexity lower bound of n log n. Comparison based sorting algorithms make no assumption about the input and can address any input case. Non-Comparison based algorithms use the nature of data items in the list to perform sorting. Their sorting algorithms use special information about the keys (values/items/elements) and operations other than comparison to determine the sorted order of elements. Consequently, n log n lower bound does not apply to these sorting algorithms. Non-comparison based algorithms run in linear time and requires special assumptions about the input sequence to be sorted.