In mathematics, radix means base, where decimal would be base 10. Imagine you have numbers some of which having more than one digits like 5, 213, 55, 21, 2334, 31, 20, 430 For simplicity, say you want to use the decimal radix (=10) for sorting. Then you would start by separating the numbers by units … Read more
The initial pass of both RadixSort and BucketSort is exactly the same. The elements are put in buckets (or bins) of incremental ranges (e.g. 0-10, 11-20, … 90-100), depending on the number of digits in the largest number. In the next pass, however, BucketSort orders up these ‘buckets’ and appends them into one array. However, … Read more
Radix sort is harder to generalize than most other sorting algorithms. It requires fixed size keys, and some standard way of breaking the keys into pieces. Thus it never finds its way into libraries.
Two arguments come to my mind: Quicksort/Introsort is more flexible: Quicksort and Introsort work well with all kinds of data. All you need for sorting is the possibility to compare items. This is trivial with numbers but you can sort other data as well. Radix sort on the other hand just sorts things by their … Read more
Let’s start with some rewriting your code in C, because C more familiar for me to explain. So lets recall your code with some comments: int counting_sort(int a[], int a_len, int maxVal) { int i, j, outPos = 0; int bucket_len = maxVal+1; int bucket[bucket_len]; /* simple bucket structure */ memset(bucket, 0, sizeof(int) * bucket_len); … Read more
Well, here’s a simple implementation of an MSD radix sort for DNA. It’s written in D because that’s the language that I use most and therefore am least likely to make silly mistakes in, but it could easily be translated to some other language. It’s in-place but requires 2 * seq.length passes through the array. … Read more