We give a general lower bound on the average-case complexity of Shellsort: the average number of data-movements (and comparisons) made by a p-pass Shellsort for any incremental sequence is \Omega\Gamma pn 1+1=p ) for every p. The proof is an example of the use of Kolmogorov complexity (the incompressibility method) in the analysis of algorithms. 1 Introduction The question of a nontrivial general lower bound (or upper bound) on the average complexity of Shellsort (due to D.L. Shell [14]) has been open for about four decades [5, 13]. We present such a lower bound for p-pass Shellsort for every p. Shellsort sorts a list of n elements in p passes using a sequence of increments h 1 ; : : : ; h p . In the kth pass the main list is divided in h k separate sublists of length dn=h k e, where the ith sublist consists of the elements at positions j, where j mod h k = i \Gamma 1, of the main list (i = 1; : : : ; h k ). Every sublist is sorted using a straightforward insertion sort. The effi...

We prove a general lower bound on the average-case complexity of Shellsort: the average number of data-movements (and comparisons) made by a p-pass Shellsort for any incremental sequence is \Omega\Gamma pn 1+ 1 p ) for all p log n. Using similar arguments, we analyze the average-case complexity of several other sorting algorithms. 1 Introduction The question of a nontrivial general lower bound (or upper bound) on the average complexity of Shellsort (due to D.L. Shell [15]) has been open for about four decades [7, 14]. We present such a lower bound for p-pass Shellsort for every p. Shellsort sorts a list of n elements in p passes using a sequence of increments h 1 ; : : : ; h p . In the kth pass the main list is divided in h k separate sublists of length n=h k , where the ith sublist consists of the elements at positions j, where j mod h k , of the main list (i = 1; : : : ; h k ). Every sublist is sorted using a straightforward insertion sort. The efficiency of the method is gove...

Recently, many results on the computational complexity of sorting algorithms were obtained using Kolmogorov complexity (the incompressibility method). Especially, the usually hard average-case analysis is ammenable to this method. Here we survey such results about Bubblesort, Heapsort, Shellsort, Dobosiewicz-sort, Shakersort, and sorting with stacks and queues in sequential or parallel mode. Especially in the case of Shellsort the uses of Kolmogorov complexity surprisingly easily resolved problems that had stayed open for a long time despite strenuous attacks.