Counting sort
As we learned from the article A lower approximation of the sorting problem complexity we cannot sort with a better time complexity than O(n log n). This limitation applies to the decision tree, which must be covered by mutual comparison of the items. However, what if we could sort the items without comparing them? Would we be able to sort the array in linear time? It sounds crazy, but it's totally possible. There are multiple sorting algorithms based on this principle and Counting sort is one of them.
This algorithm only sorts integers, which isn't necessarily a problem because it's what we usually sort. For other values, we can simply convert the data into integers (e.g. multiply the numbers with 2 decimal places by one hundred, sort them, and then divide them again). The sorting part is done using an auxiliary array which is called the counting array, sometimes also the indexing array. The counting array should be as long as
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This article is about Counting sort, which is able to sort numbers according to their value in linear time. Source codes for languages Java,C#,Delphi,Ruby.
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