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Average-Case Complexity of Shellsort

Tao Jiang·Ming Li·Paul Vitanyi
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Abstract

We prove a general lower bound on the average-case complexity of Shellsort: the average number of data-movements (and comparisons) made by a $p$-pass Shellsort for any incremental sequence is $Ω(pn^{1 + 1/p)$ for all $p \leq \log n$. Using similar arguments, we analyze the average-case complexity of several other sorting algorithms.

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Tao Jiang, Ming Li, Paul Vitanyi. 1999-01-20. Average-Case Complexity of Shellsort. https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/9901010

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