What is "library sort"

n. (context comptheory English) A form of insertion sort that leaves gaps between elements to accelerate subsequent insertions.

Library sort, or gapped insertion sort is a sorting algorithm that uses an insertion sort, but with gaps in the array to accelerate subsequent insertions. The name comes from an analogy:

Suppose a librarian were to store his books alphabetically on a long shelf, starting with the A's at the left end, and continuing to the right along the shelf with no spaces between the books until the end of the Z's. If the librarian acquired a new book that belongs to the B section, once he finds the correct space in the B section, he will have to move every book over, from the middle of the B's all the way down to the Z's in order to make room for the new book. This is an insertion sort. However, if he were to leave a space after every letter, as long as there was still space after B, he would only have to move a few books to make room for the new one. This is the basic principle of the Library Sort.

The algorithm was proposed by Michael A. Bender, Martín Farach-Colton, and Miguel Mosteiro in 2004 and was published in 2006.

Like the insertion sort it is based on, library sort is a stable comparison sort and can be run as an online algorithm; however, it was shown to have a high probability of running in O(n log n) time (comparable to quicksort), rather than an insertion sort's O(n). The mechanism used for this improvement is very similar to that of a skip list. There is no full implementation given in the paper, nor the exact algorithms of important parts, such as insertion and rebalancing. Further information would be needed to discuss how the efficiency of library sort compares to that of other sorting methods in reality.

Compared to basic insertion sort, the drawback of library sort is that it requires extra space for the gaps. The amount and distribution of that space would be implementation dependent. In the paper the size of the needed array is (1 + ε)n, but with no further recommendations on how to choose ε.

One weakness of insertion sort is that it may require a high number of swap operations and be costly if memory write is expensive. Library sort may improve that somewhat in the insertion step, as fewer elements need to move to make room, but is also adding an extra cost in the rebalancing step. In addition, locality of reference will be poor compared to mergesort as each insertion from a random data set may access memory that is no longer in cache, especially with large data sets.