Comparative Analysis between Selection Sort and Merge Sort Algorithms

Abstract

Sorting and merging are two problems that commonly arise in Computer Science especially in data processing tasks. To solve these problems, several algorithms have been developed. Similarly, existing merge and sorting algorithms have been improved to provide more efficient and accurate results. In this paper, selection and merging algorithms were developed on an octa-core processing machine using System.nanoTime methods in Java in order to compare their running times. The results obtained show that Merge Sort performs far better than selection sort with careful implementations by taking advantage of multiple processing cores in the test machine and some concurrency utility in Java. It was concluded that implementing algorithms using a machine with multiple numbers of cores in their Central Processing Unit (CPU) will result in a significant improvement in the performance of both algorithms.