Application and uses of Quicksort

Quicksort: Quick sort is an Divide Conquer algorithm and the fastest sorting algorithm. In quick sort, it creates two empty arrays to hold elements less than the pivot element and the element greater than the pivot element and then recursively sort the sub-arrays. There are many versions of Quicksort that pick pivot in different ways:

• Always pick the first element as pivot.
• Always pick the last element as pivot.
• Pick a random element as a pivot.
• Pick median as a pivot.

The principle of the Quicksort algorithm is given below:

• Select any element as pivot.
• Split the array into 3 parts: by following the below-given rules:
  • First part: All elements in this part should less than the pivot element.
  • Second part: The single element i.e. the pivot element.
  • Third part: All elements in this part should greater than or equal to the pivot element.
• Then, applying this algorithm to the first and the third part (recursively).

Below given the uses and real-time application of Quicksort:

• Commercial Computing is used in various government and private organizations for the purpose of sorting various data like sorting files by name/date/price, sorting of students by their roll no., sorting of account profile by given id, etc.
• The sorting algorithm is used for information searching and as Quicksort is the fastest algorithm so it is widely used as a better way of searching.
• It is used everywhere where a stable sort is not needed.
• Quicksort is a cache-friendly algorithm as it has a good locality of reference when used for arrays.
• It is tail -recursive and hence all the call optimization can be done.
• It is an in-place sort that does not require any extra storage memory.
• It is used in operational research and event-driven simulation.
• Numerical computations and in scientific research, for accuracy in calculations most of the efficiently developed algorithm uses priority queue and quick sort is used for sorting.
• Variants of Quicksort are used to separate the Kth smallest or largest elements.
• It is used to implement primitive type methods.
• If data is sorted then the search for information became easy and efficient.