A fault-tolerant merge sorting algorithm

Abstract

Sorting based on pairwise key comparisons is one of the most widely studied problems. We consider the problem of comparison based sorting in which some of the outcomes of comparisons can be faulty. We show how to modify merge-sorting to (nearly optimally) sort in the presence of faults. More specifically, we show that there is a variation of merge-sort that can sort n records with O(n log n) comparisons when upto e = Θ(formula presented) comparisons are faulty.