Talk:Sorting algorithm

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Sorting algorithm is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination was archived. For older candidates, please check the archive. Article milestones Date Process Result August 30, 2004 Featured article candidate Not promoted This  level-5 vital article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: Computer science Top‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computer science, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Computer science related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks. Top This article has been rated as Top-importance on the project's importance scale. Things you can help WikiProject Computer science with: Here are some tasks awaiting attention: Article requests : Requested articles/Applied arts and sciences/Computer science, computing, and Internet Cleanup : Computer science articles needing attention Computer science articles needing expert attention Copyedit : Computing Expand : Computer science Infobox : Computer science articles without infoboxes Maintain : Timeline of computing 2020–present Photo : Find pictures for the biographies of computer scientists (see List of computer scientists) Computing articles needing images Stubs : Computer science stubs Unreferenced : WikiProject Computer science/Unreferenced BLPs Project-related : Tag all relevant articles in Category:Computer science and sub-categories with {{WikiProject Computer science}}

tk pic

What is the point of the tk screenshot at the top?? —Tamfang (talk) 00:46, 21 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Seeing no response ... —Tamfang (talk) 04:52, 3 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that it wasn't very good. But I think something should be there. Do you see any good ones at Category:Sort algorithms? Perhaps File:Visualization of Gnome sort.gif Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 05:29, 3 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps an animation of a less stupid sort. ;) Heapsort or Quicksort for example. —Tamfang (talk) 06:23, 3 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There are some better ones at the Wikimedia Commons: Category:Animations of sort algorithms, see this Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 06:31, 3 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Table visibility

In the Sorting algorithm#Comparison sorts, quite a few parts of the text on the table are quite hard to see in dark mode. {{mvar}} seems to get the colours right though. Will try to find a work around. APenguinThatIsSilly("talk") 00:23, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Currently, it looks like just the latex stuff is still rendered in white on top of pastel colours. I recommend following: In HSL colour space, invert L in dark mode for table colours. This is probably a better highlighting mode for dark pages. 2001:56A:711D:4500:2593:91E0:95DF:B7C (talk) 22:07, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(Multiway) Powersort

Powersort is an improvement on Timsort and has replaced it as the default sort in CPython. Moreover, multiway Powersort is probably even faster and can plausibly claim to be state of the art. Can we find room for one or both in the comparison table? 98.114.142.14 (talk) 05:06, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Recombinant sort

I’d like to raise a question about the inclusion of "Recombinant sort" in the main list of sorting algorithms.

As far as I can tell, the algorithm is described only in its original publication(s) (an arXiv preprint and a journal article), and I have not found independent secondary sources such as textbooks, surveys, or third-party evaluations or implementations..

In the absence of such sources, listing it in the main article may give undue weight to a recently proposed and unvalidated method. I’d like to propose either removing it from the main list or relocating it to a clearly labeled section for experimental or proposed algorithms, if editors feel it should be retained at all. Ridiculous fish (talk) 07:04, 28 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

much less?

• Many of them are based on the assumption that the key size is large enough that all entries have unique key values, and hence that n ≪ 2^k, where ≪ means "much less than".

Hence? How does the assumption imply more than ${\displaystyle n\leq 2^{k}}$? —Antonissimo (talk) 04:07, 24 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]