Quicksort

A Divide and Conquer Paradigm

Instructor: Ashok Singh Sairam

Lecture Plan
• Understand the Quick sort approach
§ Examine the divide and conquer approach
§ Examples
• Proof of correctness
• Running Time

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Quicksort: Overview
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Divide and conquer: Divide
• Sort an array A[p…q]
• Divide: Partition array into two subarrays around
a pivot x such that
§ elements in lower subarray ≤ x
§ x ≤ elements in upper subarray.
§ Need to find index of x to partition the array

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Divide and conquer: Conquer
• Conquer
§ Recursively sort A[p..q] and A[q+1..r] using Quicksort
• Combine
§ Trivial: the arrays are sorted in place
§ No additional work is required to combine them
§ The entire array is now sorted
• The key step is partitioning

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Partitioning subroutine
Algorithm PARTITION(A, p, r)
x ← A[r] ⊳ pivot
i ← p -1
for j ← p to r-1 do
if A[ j] ≤ x then
i←i+1
exchange A[i] ↔ A[ j]
exchange A[i+1] ↔ A[r]
return i+1

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 Partition in Action

Courtesy: Intro to Algo: CLSR

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Quicksort Algorithm

Algorithm QUICKSORT(A, p, r)
if p < r then
q  PARTITION(A, p, r)
QUICKSORT (A, p, q-1)
QUICKSORT (A, q+1, r)

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Proof of Correctness (1)
•

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Proof of Correctness (2)
• Initialization
• i=p-1, j=p
• No elements between p and i
§ First condition is true
• No elements between i+1 and j-1
§ Second condition is true
• The assignment (x ← A[r] ) in line 1 satisfies the
third condition

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Proof of Correctness(3)

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Proof of Correctness (4)
• Termination: occur when j=r
• Every entry in the array is in one of the three sets
described by the invariant
• The final two lines of the algorithm moves the
pivot to its correct place and returns the index of
the pivot
exchange A[i+1] ↔ A[r]
return i+1

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Running Time: Worst Case
• Running time of quicksort will depend on whether
the partitioning is balanced or skewed
• Worst case partitioning
§ When one subarray has n-1 elements and the other
subarray is NULL n n
1 n-1 n
1 n-2 n-1
n 1 n-3 n-2

1
2 3
1 1 2

(n2)
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Running Time: Best Case
•

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Running Time: Balanced Partitioning
• Average case running time is much closer to the
best case (than to the worst case)
• Suppose partitioning algorithm always produces a
9-to-1 proportional split
• Recurrence

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Recurrence Tree: Balanced Partitioning

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Recurrence Tree: Balanced Partitioning

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Recurrence Tree: Balanced Partitioning

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Recurrence Tree: Balanced Partitioning

Conclusion: A 9:1 split is asymptotically same as a 1:1 split

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How partition affect performance
•

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Running Time: Average case intuition
• All permutations of the input numbers are equally likely
• On a random input array, we will have a mix of well
balanced and unbalanced splits
• Good and bad splits are randomly distributed across
throughout the tree
• For the sake of intuition, suppose the good and bad splits
occur at alternate levels of the tree

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Running Time: Average case
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Running Time: Average case
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