I came across this sorting algorithm called american sort. I read it being a variant of radix sort. Can someone elaborate me regarding this sorting algorithm and also the time and space complexity related to it.
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gsamaras
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Piyush Bhangale
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1Is this it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_flag_sort – Grimxn Jun 18 '18 at 08:01
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You are referring to the American flag sort, an efficient, in-place variant of radix sort that distributes items into hundreds of buckets. It is a Distribution Sort: where items are distributed from the input to multiple intermediate structures (buckets in this case), which are then gathered and placed on the output.
Radix sort: Time: O(nk), Space: O(n+k), n is the number of keys, k is the maximum number of digits a number (value) can have.
American flag sort: Time: O(n*k/d), Space: O(k), n is the number of digits and k is the average bucket size.
Read more in american flag sort optimization.
Read Engineering Radix Sort (1993), where in the paper experimental comparison is presented between the two algorithms.
A Java implementation of American Flag Sort.
gsamaras
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`Space: In-place` doesn't account for `counts` and `offsets` arrays, they are presumably `O(k)`, if `k` is radix or the number of buckets. – vgru Jun 18 '18 at 09:05