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(Continued from previous question...)
Google Technical Interviews in Management round: What is the Space complexity of quick sort algorithm? how do find it?
Solution: Quicksort has a space complexity of O(logn), even in the worst case, when it is carefully implemented such that
* in-place partitioning is used. This requires O(1).
* After partitioning, the partition with the fewest elements is (recursively) sorted first, requiring at most O(logn) space. Then the other partition is sorted using tail-recursion or iteration.
The version of quicksort with in-place partitioning uses only constant additional space before making any recursive call. However, if it has made O(logn) nested recursive calls, it needs to store a constant amount of information from each of them. Since the best case makes at most O(logn) nested recursive calls, it uses O(logn) space. The worst case makes O(n) nested recursive calls, and so needs O(n) space.
However, if we consider sorting arbitrarily large lists, we have to keep in mind that our variables like left and right can no longer be considered to occupy constant space; it takes O(logn) bits to index into a list of n items. Because we have variables like this in every stack frame, in reality quicksort requires O(log2n) bits of space in the best and average case and O(nlogn) space in the worst case. This isn't too terrible, though, since if the list contains mostly distinct elements, the list itself will also occupy O(nlogn) bits of space.
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