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Concept
Bubble sort
Summary
Bubble sort, sometimes referred to as sinking sort, is a simple sorting algorithm that repeatedly steps through the input list element by element, comparing the current element with the one after it, swapping their values if needed. These passes through the list are repeated until no swaps had to be performed during a pass, meaning that the list has become fully sorted. The algorithm, which is a comparison sort, is named for the way the larger elements "bubble" up to the top of the list.
This simple algorithm performs poorly in real world use and is used primarily as an educational tool. More efficient algorithms such as quicksort, timsort, or merge sort are used by the sorting libraries built into popular programming languages such as Python and Java.
However, if parallel processing is allowed, bubble sort sorts in O(n) time, making it considerably faster than parallel implementations of insertion sort or selection sort which do not parallelize as effectively.
The earliest description of the Bubble sort algorithm was in a 1956 paper by mathematician and actuary Edward Harry Friend, Sorting on electronic computer systems, published in the third issue of the third volume of the Journal of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) , as a "Sorting exchange algorithm". Friend described the fundamentals of the algorithm, and, although initially his paper went unnoticed, some years later, it was rediscovered by many computer scientists, including Kenneth E. Iverson who coined its current name.
Bubble sort has a worst-case and average complexity of , where is the number of items being sorted. Most practical sorting algorithms have substantially better worst-case or average complexity, often . Even other sorting algorithms, such as insertion sort, generally run faster than bubble sort, and are no more complex. For this reason, bubble sort is rarely used in practice.
Like insertion sort, bubble sort is adaptive, giving it an advantage over algorithms like quicksort.
Official source
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