Monday, 18 January 2016

Selection Sort Algorithm

Selection Sort Algorithm
The selection sort is making a pass through all the elements and selecting, the shortest one. This shortest element is then swapped with the element on the left end of the line, at position 0. Now the leftmost element is sorted and won’t need to be moved again. The sorted elements accumulate on the left (lower indices), whereas in the bubble sort they accumulated on the right.
The next time we pass down the row of elements, we start at position 1, and, finding
the minimum, swap with position 1. This process continues until all the elements are
sorted.
If there are n elements to be sorted then, the process mentioned above should be repeated n-1 times to get required result.

Working of selection sort algorithm.
How selection sort algorithm works in programming?
Sort Algorithm

public void selectionSort()
{
      int out, in, min;
     for(out=0; out<nElems-1; out++) // outer loop
      {
         min = out; // minimum
         for(in=out+1; in<nElems; in++) // inner loop
               if(a[in] < a[min] ) // if min greater,
                       min = in; // we have a new min
               swap(out, min); // swap them
     } // end for(out)
} // end selectionSort()
The outer loop, with loop variable out, starts at the beginning of the array (index 0)
and proceeds toward higher indices. The inner loop, with loop variable in, begins at
out and likewise proceeds to the right.
At each new position of in, the elements a[in] and a[min] are compared. If a[in] is
smaller, then min is given the value of in. At the end of the inner loop, min points to
the minimum value, and the array elements pointed to by out and min are swapped.

Efficiency of the Selection Sort
The selection sort performs N*(N-1)/2  number of comparisons. For large values of N, the comparison times  for the selection is  O(N2) time, it is faster because there are so few swaps. For smaller values of N, the selection sort may in fact be considerably faster, especially if the swap times are much larger than the comparison times.

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