Introduction and Survey; F.2.2 [Analysis of Algorithms and Problem Complexity]: Nonnumerical Algorithms and Problems --- Sorting and Searching; E.5 [Data]: Files --- Sorting/searching; G.3 [Mathematics of Computing]: Probability and Statistics --- Probabilistic algorithms; E.2 [Data Storage Representation]: Composite structures, linked representations. General Terms: Algorithms, Theory. Additional Key Words and Phrases: Adaptive sorting algorithms, Comparison trees, Measures of disorder, Nearly sorted sequences, Randomized algorithms. A Survey of Adaptive Sorting Algorithms 2 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I.1 Optimal adaptivity I.2 Measures of disorder I.3 Organization of the paper 1.WORST-CASE ADAPTIVE (INTERNAL) SORTING ALGORITHMS 1.1 Generic Sort 1.2 Cook--Kim division 1.3 Partition Sort 1.4 Exponential Search 1.5 Adaptive Merging 2.EXPECTED-CASE ADAPTIV

: We describe a sorting algorithm that is optimally adaptive with respect to several important measures of presortedness. In particular, the algorithm requires O(n+k log k) time on n-sequences X that have a longest ascending subsequence of length n \Gamma k and for which Rem(X) = k; O(n log(k=n)) time on sequences with k inversions; and O(n log k) time on sequences that can be decomposed into k monotone shuffles. The algorithm makes use of an adaptive merging operation that can be implemented using finger search trees. 1 Introduction An adaptive algorithm is one which requires fewer resources to solve `easy' problem instances than it does to solve `hard'. For sorting an adaptive algorithm should run in O(n) time if presented with a sorted n-sequence, and in O(n log n) time for all n- sequences, with the time for any particular sequence depending upon the `nearness' of the sequence to being sorted. Mannila [7] established the notion of a measure of presortedness to quantify the disord...