frasette

frasette

A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms, Second Edition: Are Selection Sort steps wrong? (page 71)

Hi @jaywengrow,

I think the table of Selection Sort shows wrong Max number of steps.
For example, for N = 5 we sould have:

  • Comparsions: 10 + Swaps: 2

and not:

  • Comparsions: 10 + Swaps: 4

In the following code, edit size variable to the number of element you want (5,10,20,40,80), run it to print comparsions and steps, and their sum, for a worst case scenario with a descending order array:
fiddle url: JsFiddle

function selectionSort(array) {
  let comparsions = 0;
  let swaps = 0;
  for(let i = 0; i < array.length - 1; i++) {    
    let lowestNumberIndex = i;
    for(let j = i + 1; j < array.length; j++) {
      if(array[j] < array[lowestNumberIndex]) {
        lowestNumberIndex = j;
      }
      comparsions++;
    }
 
    if(lowestNumberIndex != i) {
      swaps++;
      let temp = array[i];
      array[i] = array[lowestNumberIndex];
      array[lowestNumberIndex] = temp;
    }
  }
  let steps = "Comparsions: " + comparsions + " Swaps: " + swaps;
  console.log(steps);
  return array;
}

// code to create a sample of array size = 5,10,20,40,80
let size    = 80;
let counter = size;
let sample  = new Array(size);

for (i = 0; i < size; i++) {
   sample[i] = counter;
   counter--;
}

console.log(selectionSort(sample))

What do you think? Thanks.

Marked As Solved

jaywengrow

jaywengrow

Author of A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms

Hi,

This is a really good catch! I think that for Selection Sort, the worst case scenario is still 4 swaps, but you’re right that an array in perfect descending order happens not to be the worst case scenario for Selection Sort.

An array like this: [5, 3, 1, 2, 4] - will still give you 4 swaps in Selection Sort.

I’ll have to clarify this in the next version. Thank you!

-Jay

Where Next?

Popular Pragmatic Bookshelf topics Top

mikecargal
Title: Hands-On Rust (Chapter 11: prefab) Just played a couple of amulet-less games. With a bit of debugging, I believe that your can_p...
New
AleksandrKudashkin
On the page xv there is an instruction to run bin/setup from the main folder. I downloaded the source code today (12/03/21) and can’t see...
New
leonW
I ran this command after installing the sample application: $ cards add do something --owner Brian And got a file not found error: Fil...
New
curtosis
Running mix deps.get in the sensor_hub directory fails with the following error: ** (Mix) No SSH public keys found in ~/.ssh. An ssh aut...
New
brunogirin
When I run the coverage example to report on missing lines, I get: pytest --cov=cards --report=term-missing ch7 ERROR: usage: pytest [op...
New
brunogirin
When trying to run tox in parallel as explained on page 151, I got the following error: tox: error: argument -p/–parallel: expected one...
New
hazardco
On page 78 the following code appears: &lt;%= link_to ‘Destroy’, product, class: ‘hover:underline’, method: :delete, data: { confirm...
New
taguniversalmachine
Hi, I am getting an error I cannot figure out on my test. I have what I think is the exact code from the book, other than I changed “us...
New
mert
AWDWR 7, page 152, page 153: Hello everyone, I’m a little bit lost on the hotwire part. I didn’t fully understand it. On page 152 @rub...
New
dachristenson
I just bought this book to learn about Android development, and I’m already running into a major issue in Ch. 1, p. 20: “Update activity...
New

Other popular topics Top

Devtalk
Reading something? Working on something? Planning something? Changing jobs even!? If you’re up for sharing, please let us know what you’...
1045 20892 392
New
DevotionGeo
I know that these benchmarks might not be the exact picture of real-world scenario, but still I expect a Rust web framework performing a ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Design and develop sophisticated 2D games that are as much fun to make as they are to play. From particle effects and pathfinding to soci...
New
New
New
Rainer
My first contact with Erlang was about 2 years ago when I used RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang, for my job. This made me curious and...
New
AstonJ
I ended up cancelling my Moonlander order as I think it’s just going to be a bit too bulky for me. I think the Planck and the Preonic (o...
New
AstonJ
Do the test and post your score :nerd_face: :keyboard: If possible, please add info such as the keyboard you’re using, the layout (Qw...
New
foxtrottwist
A few weeks ago I started using Warp a terminal written in rust. Though in it’s current state of development there are a few caveats (tab...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Explore the power of Ash Framework by modeling and building the domain for a real-world web application. Rebecca Le @sevenseacat and ...
New

Sub Categories: