On Adaptive Integer Sorting

Anna Pagh, Rasmus Pagh, and Mikkel Thorup

In Proc. 12th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms, ESA 2004.


Abstract

This paper considers integer sorting on a RAM. We show that adaptive sorting of a sequence with qn inversions is asymptotically equivalent to multisorting groups of at most q keys, and a total of n keys. Using the recent O(n sqrt(loglog n)) expected time sorting of Han and Thorup on each set, we immediately get an adaptive expected sorting time of O(n sqrt(loglog q)). Interestingly, for any positive constant e, we show that multisorting and adaptive inversion sorting can be performed in linear time if q<= 2^(log n)^(1-e). We also show how to asymptotically improve the running time of any traditional sorting algorithm on a class of inputs much broader than those with few inversions.