Quick Sort Visualization

What is Quick Sort Algorithm?

Quicksort is an in-place sorting algorithm. Developed by British computer scientist Tony Hoare in 1959 and published in 1961, it is still a commonly used algorithm for sorting. When implemented well, it can be somewhat faster than merge sort and about two or three times faster than heapsort.

Quicksort is a divide-and-conquer algorithm. It works by selecting a ‘pivot’ element from the array and partitioning the other elements into two sub-arrays, according to whether they are less than or greater than the pivot. For this reason, it is sometimes called partition-exchange sort. The sub-arrays are then sorted recursively. This can be done in-place, requiring small additional amounts of memory to perform the sorting.

Quicksort is a comparison sort, meaning that it can sort items of any type for which a “less-than” relation (formally, a total order) is defined. Efficient implementations of Quicksort are not a stable sort, meaning that the relative order of equal sort items is not preserved.

Mathematical analysis of quicksort shows that, on average, the algorithm takes {\displaystyle O(n\log {n})}O(n\log {n}) comparisons to sort n items. In the worst case, it makes {\displaystyle O(n^{2})}O(n^{2}) comparisons.

Source: Wikipedia

JavaScript implementation

 function quickSort(arr, left, right) {
  var i = left;
  var j = right;
  var tmp;
  var pivotidx = (left + right) / 2;
  var pivot = parseInt(arr[pivotidx.toFixed()]);
  /* partition */
  while (i <= j)
  {
    while (parseInt(arr[i]) < pivot)
      i++;
    while (parseInt(arr[j]) > pivot)
      j--;
    if (i <= j)
    {
      tmp = arr[i];
      arr[i] = arr[j];
      arr[j] = tmp;
      i++;
      j--;
    }
  }

  /* recursion */
  if (left < j)
    this.quickSort(arr, left, j);
  if (i < right)
    this.quickSort(arr, i, right);

  return arr;
}