Welcome, aspiring programmer! Today's topic is Merge Sort. Merge Sort is a sorting technique similar to arranging a deck of shuffled cards in order. But for data on an Internet scale, Merge Sort outperforms your regular techniques. Today, we'll explore Merge Sort, code it in C#
, and analyze its speed. Ready? Let's get started!
In computer science, Merge Sort is a popular method to sort elements. Merge Sort uses the same 'divide-and-conquer' strategy for sorting as the familiar Quick Sort algorithm. In the three steps of Merge Sort:
- Split the array into halves.
- Sort each half separately.
- Merge the sorted halves back together.
We will start by building code for merging two sorted parts. The merge process makes two halves play sort and seek. It compares elements from two halves and merges them so that the resulting list is sorted as well.
Let's code a Merge()
function in C#
that will do just that. Note that the final variant of the merge sort function will do every operation "in place," meaning there will not be actual two arrays; we will operate parts of one array. Bearing this in mind, let's implement the Merge
function to take just one array and treat its parts like separate arrays.
