The fastest known Sorting Algorithm (on average, and for a large number of elements), requiring steps. Quicksort is a recursive algorithm which first partitions an array according to several rules (Sedgewick 1978):
Quicksort was invented by Hoare (1961, 1962), has undergone extensive analysis and scrutiny (Sedgewick 1975, 1977, 1978), and is known to be about twice as fast as the next fastest Sorting algorithm. In the worst case, however, quicksort is a slow algorithm (and for quicksort, ``worst case'' corresponds to already sorted).
See also Heapsort, Sorting
References
Aho, A. V.; Hopcroft, J. E.; and Ullmann, J. D. Data Structures and Algorithms. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,
pp. 260-270, 1987.
Hoare, C. A. R. ``Partition: Algorithm 63,'' ``Quicksort: Algorithm 64,'' and ``Find: Algorithm 65.'' Comm. ACM 4, 321-322, 1961.
Hoare, C. A. R. ``Quicksort.'' Computer J. 5, 10-15, 1962.
Press, W. H.; Flannery, B. P.; Teukolsky, S. A.; and Vetterling, W. T. ``Quicksort.'' §8.2 in
Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN: The Art of Scientific Computing, 2nd ed. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 323-327, 1992.
Sedgewick, R. Quicksort. Ph.D. thesis. Stanford Computer Science Report STAN-CS-75-492. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, May 1975.
Sedgewick, R. ``The Analysis of Quicksort Programs.'' Acta Informatica 7, 327-355, 1977.
Sedgewick, R. ``Implementing Quicksort Programs.'' Comm. ACM 21, 847-857, 1978.