Computing

Why sorting gets slow so fast: bubble sort versus merge sort and n log n

Shuffled grey bars on the left, an arrow, and the same bars sorted into lime green steps on the right
30seconds
The 30-second version

Two sorting methods can both be perfectly correct and still differ by a factor of 25,000 on a big list.

Race bubble sort against merge sort on the same shuffled bars, watch the comparison counters, then slide the list size up to a billion and see why doubling the input can quadruple the work for one method and barely more than double it for the other.

Deep dive · 3 min
Deep dive · 3 min

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