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From: pattis@cs.washington.edu (Richard Pattis)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: ALGORITHMS ANYBODY?
Summary: Meet me at high noon
Message-ID: <12872@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 23 Aug 90 18:48:09 GMT
References: <90Aug22.090345edt.9450@neat.cs.toronto.edu> <1990Aug23.153652.23949@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 24

In article <1990Aug23.153652.23949@Neon.Stanford.EDU>, kanamori@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Atsushi Kanamori) writes:
> In article <12868@june.cs.washington.edu> pattis@cs.washington.edu (Richard Pattis) writes:
> >
> >What exactly is wrong with bubble sort? 
> 
> Because there are two other N**2 algorithms that are just as intuitive
> (more, imho) and are more efficient. If I were teaching sorting algorithms,
> I would much prefer that the students adopt insertion or selection sort
> as their quick & dirty standby.
> 
> Bubblesort is basically a selection sort where the "find smallest element"
> part is written incredibly inefficiently and performs a lot of extra
> swaps that don't need to be there. Whereas selection sort moves the
> smallest element to the top in one swift leap, bubblesort does it the hard
> way by bubbling it up using multiple swaps. Seems like an unnecessary burden,
> both on the cpu & human brain.

OK; choose your language and write either of those sorting procedures; I'll
write bubble sort. Then, write a one paragraph justification of why your
sorting procedure works; I'll do the same.  The justification should include
a demonstration that the array is sorted, and a permutation of the input
array.

Rich