This course covers the essential information that every serious programmer needs to know about algorithms and data structures, with emphasis on applications and scientific performance analysis of Java implementations. Part I covers elementary data structures, sorting, and searching algorithms. Part II focuses on graph- and string-processing algorithms. All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.
Sorting Introduction
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From the course by Princeton University
Algorithms, Part I
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From the lesson
Elementary Sorts
We introduce the sorting problem and Java's Comparable interface. We study two elementary sorting methods (selection sort and insertion sort) and a variation of one of them (shellsort). We also consider two algorithms for uniformly shuffling an array. We conclude with an application of sorting to computing the convex hull via the Graham scan algorithm.
Meet the Instructors
Kevin WaynePhillip Y. Goldman '86 Senior Lecturer
Computer Science
Robert SedgewickWilliam O. Baker *39 Professor of Computer Science
Computer Science
Okay, what are the rules that we're going to follow? Well, let's start with looking
at a typical basic sorting problem. Say, university has student records and for
every student there is a certain amount of information. Maybe there's a class number,
there is a grade, there's a phone number maybe an address so we refer to an item
and it has a record or the information that we're going to sort. But in
particular, there's a piece of a record called a key and what we want to do is put
the records into order according to the key. That's the sort problem. Re-arrange
an array of n items into ascending order according to a defined key which is part
of the item. Now, our goal is to be able to sort any type of data so let's look at
a couple of client programs. First example is to just sort some random real numbers
into ascending order. So, here's a client that calls our insertion sort method and
all it does is read numbers from standard input than into an array a then calls
insertion sort and then prints them out. And you can see on the right that the
numbers are printed out in sorted order. This seems like an artificial kind of
input but actually we'll look at an application even in this lecture. And then
there are many applications where random inputs are fine model. Here's maybe a more
familiar sort client that sort strings. And in this case it reads the strings from
a file using our readStrings() method in our In class that which takes a file as
argument. So we take the file name as the first command line argument, read in array
of string from that file separated by blanks, call an Insertion.sort() method again. So,
Insertion.sort is a method that takes an array a as its parameter and it, it's the
first argument and it rearranges the strings in that array to be in sorted
order. So in this case words, words three.text has the certain number of three
letter words and this client program will result in those three letter words being
rearranged into alphabetical order. Here's another client that we could use
our sort program for, if we achieved the goal of sorting any type of data. In this
one, we're going to sort file, file's name in a given directory. So again we use the
File class from Java and we use, we go and use the listFiles() method from that class
to get an array that contains all the file names in the given directory. That's an
array with file names in it and Insertion.sort() takes that array as its first
argument and again sorts them and then we go ahead and use as, go through them one
by one and print them and they come out in order of file name. So that's three
different clients, three completely different types of data. And the first
rule of the game that we have to think about is, how can we make it so that we
can implement one sort program that can be used by these three different clients to
implement three different types of data. In the way that, that happens is a
mechanism known as a callback. So, that's our basic question, how can sort, now, how
to compare data of all those different types without being given any information
about the type of an item's key? And the answer is that what is we set up a
mechanism known as a callback or reference to executable code where the client, by
passing an array of objects to the sort function. In Java, there's an implicit
mechanism that says that any such array of object is going to have the compareTo()
method, then the sort function calls back the compareTo() method associated with the
objects in the array when it ever needs, whenever it needs to compare two items.
There's a lot of different ways to implement callbacks and that's
programming language specific. Different languages have different mechanisms. It's
all about the idea of passing functions as arguments to other functions which is the
pair and gets into functional programming and thinking all the way back to Turing and
Church. For Java, because of the desire to check types at compile time, the use of
specific method called an interface and then, we'll look at the details of how to
implement callbacks with the Java interfaces now. It's a little bit of
programming language detailed but it's, it's really worthwhile because it allows
us to use the sorts that we developed for any type of data in a type safe manner. So
we already looked at some clients. This is the example of the client program that
sorts the files in a given directory by file name. So it just calls our sort()
method with a, an array some type of object as first argument. Now, built in to
Java is the so-called the Comparable interface and all the Comparable interface
is the specification that a type, data type that implements Comparable will have
a compareTo() method. And it's generic and will be compared to against a certain type
of item. Now when we implement objects that are to be sorted we'll implement the
Comparable method. That's up in the top class file, implements comparable file.
And since sorting is an operation that's used in so many situations, many of the
standard Java types that you would expect to involve sorts will implement
Comparable. And all that means is that, that data type has an instance method that
will implement the compareTo() method. It'll compare this object against the
object given as argument and depending on some complicated tests, it'll return -1,
meaning less, +1, meaning greater or 0, meaning equal. Now, that compareTo()
method is really all that the sort implementation needs. First it says that,
that it's going to take as argument an array of type Comparable. So that means,
the objects in the array are going to implement the Comparable interface or that
it will have a compareTo() method. And then the sort code can just use that compareTo()
method, invoked in a sense of the object like an entry in the array and as
argument and another instance in the object like another entry in the array to
test whether the first is less than the second as in this example. The key point
is that the sort implementation has no dependence on the type of data that's
handled by the Comparable interface and a different Comparable array will be sorted
in the same way though eventually, because of the interface mechanism, they call back
to the actual compareTo() code that goes with a type of object being sorted. Now
there's a few rules and there's natural rules but they're worth talking about and
paying attention to that the compareTo() method has to implement in the so called a
total order. In all that saying is really that it must be possible to put items in
order in a sort. So there's three properties. First one says that if v is
less than or equal to w and w is less than or equal to v then the only way for that
to be true is if they're equal and then there's transitivity. If v less than w, w
is less than x, then v must be less than or equal to x. In totality, is that either
v is less than or equal to w or w is less than equal to v or both they are equal.
And there's plenty of natural total orders in the types of data that we normally want
to consider for sort keys. Like the integers or natural numbers or real
numbers or alphabetical order for strings, chronological order for dates or times and
so forth. The cartoon on the right shows that not all orders are necessarily total
orders. So, rock, paper, scissors is intransitive. If you know that v is less
that w, w is less than v, you don't know that v is less than or equal to v. I'm
sorry, v is less than w, w less than equal to x that you don't necessarily know that
v is less than or equal to x. Alright. So the Comparable API then, by convention in
Java we always need to implement compareTo() such that v that compared to w is a
total order. And also by convention, it returns a negative integer for its less
zero if it's equal positive its greater. If this object is greater than the object
given as argument. If the types are incompatible or if either one is null
compareTo() should throw an exception. Now, again, many of Java's standard types
for numbers and dates and files and so forth implement compareTo() by convention.
Now if we're going to implement our own type then we have to go ahead and
implement the Comparable interface according to these rules. And usually
that's fairly straightforward. So here's an example. It's a simplified version of
the Date class that's implemented within Java just to show the idea of implementing
Comparable. So, after the class declaration, we write implements
Comparable and then we fill in the generic with the same type because we're only
going to compare dates to other dates. In this implementation, the Date class has
three instance variables. The month, the day and the year and the constructor
fills those from the arguments as you can see. So now, if you want to compare two
different dates then the first thing to do is to check if this year is less than that
year, over that is the year given, the date given in the argument. If that's true
then it's less return -1 and if it's, the year is greater, return +1.
Otherwise, the year, years must be equal so we have to look at the months to do the
compare and so forth down to do the days. Only if they're all equal that we return
zero. So, that's an example of an implementation of Comparable by
implementing the compareTo() method to put dates in order as you might expect. So the
Java language helps us with this Comparable mechanism so that we can sort
data of any type. When we continue to implement sorting algorithms, we're
actually even in a hide that beneath our own implementations. So, that are sorting
algorithms actually their actual code can be used to implement sorting in many other
languages. The way we do that is to take the two primary operations, compares and
exchangers that were that were, were used to refer the data and encapsulate them
just the static methods. So, we're going to use a method less() that takes two
Comparable objects as arguments and it just returns, v.compareTo(w) less than
zero. And then the other thing that we do when we sort items that are in an array is
to, to swap or exchange of the item at a given index i with the one at a given
index j. And that's every programmer's first introduction to assignment
statements. We save a[i] in a variable swap, put a[j] in a[i], and then put swap back
in a[j]. So now our sort methods to refer the data will just use this two static
methods. And there's a good reason for that. Here's an example. Suppose we want
to test if an array is sorted. So this is a static method that is supposed to return
true if the array is sorted and false if it's not. And all it does is just go through
the array from the one to the length of the array and test if each item is less
than the one before. If you have an item that's less than one before then it's not
sorted you return false. If you get all the way through the array without that
happening, then you say the array is true. That's pretty simple code, the question
is, if you have a sorting algorithm that passes that test, are you sure that it
correctly sorted the array? Well the answer to that question is, yes if, yes if
you used only the less() and exchange() methods to implement, to refer the data
because then you know because you used the exchange() method that the data in the array
after the sort is the same data as was in the array before the sort, sort. If you
have a sort method that can store any values in an array, it could, for example,
store zeros in every array entry that method would pass this test, but it didn't
really correctly sort the array because overwrote all the values. So, we use less()
and exchange() to be sure that we can test that our, our methods work with the method
like this.
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