Gnome sort

Gnome sort is a sorting algorithm which is similar to insertion sort, except that moving an element to its proper place is accomplished by a series of swaps, as in bubble sort. The name comes from the supposed behavior of the Dutch garden gnome in sorting a line of flowerpots and is described on Dick Grune's Gnome sort page It is conceptually simple, requiring no nested loops. The running time is O(n²). In practice the algorithm can run as fast a... more

Gnome sort is a sorting algorithm which is similar to insertion sort, except that moving an element to its proper place is accomplished by a series of swaps, as in bubble sort. The name comes from the supposed behavior of the Dutch garden gnome in sorting a line of flowerpots and is described on Dick Grune's Gnome sort page It is conceptually simple, requiring no nested loops. The running time is O(n²). In practice the algorithm can run as fast as Insertion sort. The algorithm always finds the first place where two adjacent elements are in the wrong order, and swaps them. It takes advantage of the fact that performing a swap can introduce a new out-of-order adjacent pair only right before or after the two swapped elements. It does not assume that elements forward of the current position are sorted, so it only needs to check the position directly before the swapped elements. Here is pseudocode for the sort. This is an optimized version which uses variable j to allow the gnome to skip... less