Quicksort is a sorting algorithm which is frequently used in real life.
Let's explore different senarios where we can implement Quicksort:-
Array Containing 0 or 1 Element
Empty arrays and single element array will not need to be sorted. The base case will be the result for them.
Array Containing 2 Elements
An array containing two Elements is also easy to sort.
Array Containing 3 Elements
In order to sort an array containing three elements, we need to break it down to the base case using the Divide & Conquer approach.
- First pickup an element from the array, called the pivot.
(Will discuss how to pickup a good pivot later, for now lets take the first element as pivot.)
- Now find the elements smaller than the pivot and the elements larger than the pivot.
This is called Partioning. You have :
1) A sub-array of all the numbers less than the pivot
2) The pivot
3) A sub-array of all the numbers more than the pivot
- The two two sub-arrays obtained are not neccessarily sorted. Therefore, we come come across 2 cases:
1) If the sub-arrays are sorted then we can combine the whole thing
left array + pivot + right array = Sorted Array
2) If the sub-arrays are not sorted then we have to sort them.
We can do that by applying quicksort on the sub-arrays (since we know the results of sorting an array containing 0 or 1 elements or 2 elements array).
quicksort([15, 10]) + [33] + quicksort([])
> [10, 15, 33]
- Similary, we can choose any element of the array as pivot and apply the above steps to obtain a sorted array.
Array Containing 4 Elements
Suppose we are given an array
- We choose 33 as the pivot element.
- The left sub-array has 3 elements. We had already seen how to sort an array of three elements: call quicksort on it recursively.
- Therefore, we can now easily repeat the steps learned above to sort the 4 elements array.
Sorting an array of 5 elements (Different Pivots)
Given Array :
Different Pivot Elements :
Notice: all the sub-arrays of any pivot lies between 0-4 elements, and we can easily sort them as seen in the above examples.
Example 1)
Example 2)
The Code for Quicksort
def quicksort(array):
if len(array) < 2:
return array
# Base Case: arrays with 0 or 1 elements
else:
pivot = array[0]
# Recursive Case
less = [ i for i in array [1:] if i <= pivot]
# Sub-array to the left of the pivot
greater = [ i for i in array [1:] if i > pivot]
# Sub-array to the right of the pivot
return quicksort(less) + [pivot] + quicksort(greater)
print quicksort([10, 5, 2, 3])
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