Quicksort

Quicksort

Animated visualization of the quicksort algorithm. The horizontal lines are pivot values.
Class	Sorting algorithm
Worst-case performance	O(n2)
Best-case performance	O(n log n) (simple partition) or O(n) (three-way partition and equal keys)
Average performance	O(n log n)
Worst-case space complexity	O(n) auxiliary (naive) O(log n) auxiliary (Sedgewick 1978)

Quicksort (sometimes called partition-exchange sort) is an efficient sorting algorithm, serving as a systematic method for placing the elements of an array in order. Developed by Tony Hoare in 1959, with his work published in 1961, it is still a commonly used algorithm for sorting. When implemented well, it can be about two or three times faster than its main competitors, merge sort and heapsort.

Quicksort is a comparison sort, meaning that it can sort items of any type for which a "less-than" relation (formally, a total order) is defined. In efficient implementations it is not a stable sort, meaning that the relative order of equal sort items is not preserved. Quicksort can operate in-place on an array, requiring small additional amounts of memory to perform the sorting.

Mathematical analysis of quicksort shows that, on average, the algorithm takes O(n log n) comparisons to sort n items. In the worst case, it makes O(n²) comparisons, though this behavior is rare.

The quicksort algorithm was developed in 1959 by Tony Hoare while in the Soviet Union, as a visiting student at Moscow State University. At that time, Hoare worked in a project on machine translation for the National Physical Laboratory. As a part of the translation process, he needed to sort the words of Russian sentences prior to looking them up in a Russian-English dictionary that was already sorted in alphabetic order on magnetic tape. After recognizing that his first idea, insertion sort, would be slow, he quickly came up with a new idea that was Quicksort. He wrote a program in Mercury for the partition but couldn't write the program to account for the list of unsorted segments. On return to England, he was asked to write code for Shellsort as part of his new job. Hoare mentioned to his boss that he knew of a faster algorithm and his boss bet sixpence that he didn't. His boss ultimately accepted that he had lost the bet. Later, Hoare learned about ALGOL and its ability to do recursion that enabled him to publish the code in ACM.