Non-Recursive Merge Sort

Question

Can someone explain in English how does Non-Recursive merge sort works ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Non-recursive merge sort works by considering window sizes of 1,2,4,8,16..2^n over the input array. For each window ('k' in code below), all adjacent pairs of windows are merged into a temporary space, then put back into the array.

Here is my single function, C-based, non-recursive merge sort. Input and output are in 'a'. Temporary storage in 'b'. One day, I'd like to have a version that was in-place:

float a[50000000],b[50000000];
void mergesort (long num)
{
    int rght, wid, rend;
    int i,j,m,t;

    for (int k=1; k < num; k *= 2 ) {       
        for (int left=0; left+k < num; left += k*2 ) {
            rght = left + k;        
            rend = rght + k;
            if (rend > num) rend = num; 
            m = left; i = left; j = rght; 
            while (i < rght && j < rend) { 
                if (a[i] <= a[j]) {         
                    b[m] = a[i]; i++;
                } else {
                    b[m] = a[j]; j++;
                }
                m++;
            }
            while (i < rght) { 
                b[m]=a[i]; 
                i++; m++;
            }
            while (j < rend) { 
                b[m]=a[j]; 
                j++; m++;
            }
            for (m=left; m < rend; m++) { 
                a[m] = b[m]; 
            }
        }
    }
}

By the way, it is also very easy to prove this is O(n log n). The outer loop over window size grows as power of two, so k has log n iterations. While there are many windows covered by inner loop, together, all windows for a given k exactly cover the input array, so inner loop is O(n). Combining inner and outer loops: O(n)*O(log n) = O(n log n).