Java 6 Illuminated: An Active Learning Approach, 2nd Edition

510 CHAPTER 8 Single-Dimensional Arrays

8.6.2 Selection Sort

The member IDs in the preceding winners array were in random order, so

when a member was not a winner, our findWinners method needed to look

at every element in the array before discovering that the ID we were looking

for was not in the array. This is not efficient, since most members are not

winners. The larger the array, the more inefficient a sequential search

becomes. We could simplify the search by arranging the elements in

numeric order, which is called sorting the array. Once the array is sorted,

we can use various algorithms to speed up a search. Later in this chapter, we

discuss how ...