Abstract

We introduce a novel approach to the classical problem of in-situ, stable merging, where "in-situ" means the use of no more than O(log 2 n) bits of extra memory for lists of size n. Shufflemerge reduces the merging problem to the problem of realising the "perfect shuffle" permutation, that is, the exact interleaving of two, equal length lists. The algorithm is recursive, using a logarithmic number of variables, and so does not use absolutely minimum storage, i.e., a fixed number of variables. A simple method of realising the perfect shuffle uses one extra bit per element, and so is not in-situ. We show that the perfect shuffle can be attained using absolutely minimum storage and in linear time, at the expense of doubling the number of moves, relative to the simple method. We note that there is a worst case for Shufflemerge requiring time\Omega\Gamma n log n), where n is the sum of the lengths of the input lists. We also present an analysis of a variant of Shufflemerge which uses a ...

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