Sorting floating numbers
by Daniel Lee Last Edit: 27 January 2013
INTRODUCTION
During a CS251: Data Structure & Algorithms lecture about various sorting algorithms, Professor A mentioned a sorting algorithm of linear running time - radix sort. While showing us how radix sort can be used to sort binary numbers, he added that radix sort is not a general-purpose sorting algorithm, and our lower-bound for comparison sorts are still set at O(nlogn). But I wonder - all digital objects are represented as 0/1 in memory. Can I use radix sort to sort objects like floating point number whose binary structure is well defined?
PRELIMINARIES
Radix Sort
It's well known that the comparison sorting algorithms have a theoretical lower bound of $ n \log n $
Floating Point Numbers
TASKS
1. Implement radix sort for integers (CHECK)
2. Investigate how floating point is represented in memory and device a method to sort floating point numbers
3. Implement modified radix sort for floating point numbers
4. Naive analysis of running time?
RESULTS
TBUploaded
