Introduction to Computational Thinking: Problem Solving, Algorithms, Data Structures, and More

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021

T. MailundIntroduction to Computational Thinkinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7077-6_5

5. Searching and Sorting

Thomas Mailund¹  

(1)

Aarhus N, Denmark

 

In this chapter, we will explore two fundamental problems that are the foundations of many other algorithms: sorting sequences and searching for an element in them. These are central problems used as building blocks for a variety of other algorithms, and Python already has built-in functionality for solving them. You should practically always use the existing implementations; they are well engineered and optimized, so you are not likely to implement faster solutions yourself. The exception is when you have ...