What is a bubble sort good for? [closed]

Answer 1

It's probably the fastest for tiny sets.

Speaking of education. A link to the last scene of sorting out sorting, it's amazing. A must-see.

Answer 2

It depends on the way your data is distributed - if you can make some assumptions.

One of the best links I've found to understand when to use a bubble sort - or some other sort, is this - an animated view on sorting algorithms:

http://www.sorting-algorithms.com/

Answer 3

It doesn't get used much in the real world. It's a good learning tool because it's easy to understand and fast to implement. It has bad (O(n^2)) worst case and average performance. It has good best case performance when you know the data is almost sorted, but there are plenty of other algorithms that have this property, with better worst and average case performance.

Answer 4

we recently used bubblesort in an optimality proof for an algorithm. We had to transform an arbitrary optimal solution represented by a sequence of objects into a solution that was found by our algorithm. Because our algorithm was just "Sort by this criteria", we had to prove that we can sort an optimal solution without making it worse. In this case, bubble sort was a very good algorithm to use, because it has the nice invariant of just swapping two elements that are next to each other and are in the wrong order. Using more complicated algorithms there would have melted brains, I think.

Greetings.