[algorithm] Quicksort: Choosing the pivot

Never ever choose a fixed pivot - this can be attacked to exploit your algorithm's worst case O(n2) runtime, which is just asking for trouble. Quicksort's worst case runtime occurs when partitioning results in one array of 1 element, and one array of n-1 elements. Suppose you choose the first element as your partition. If someone feeds an array to your algorithm that is in decreasing order, your first pivot will be the biggest, so everything else in the array will move to the left of it. Then when you recurse, the first element will be the biggest again, so once more you put everything to the left of it, and so on.

A better technique is the median-of-3 method, where you pick three elements at random, and choose the middle. You know that the element that you choose won't be the the first or the last, but also, by the central limit theorem, the distribution of the middle element will be normal, which means that you will tend towards the middle (and hence, nlog(n) time).

If you absolutely want to guarantee O(nlog(n)) runtime for the algorithm, the columns-of-5 method for finding the median of an array runs in O(n) time, which means that the recurrence equation for quicksort in the worst case will be:

T(n) = O(n) (find the median) + O(n) (partition) + 2T(n/2) (recurse left and right)

By the Master Theorem, this is O(nlog(n)). However, the constant factor will be huge, and if worst case performance is your primary concern, use a merge sort instead, which is only a little bit slower than quicksort on average, and guarantees O(nlog(n)) time (and will be much faster than this lame median quicksort).

Explanation of the Median of Medians Algorithm