The Limiting Distribution for the Number of Symbol Comparisons Used by QuickSort is Nondegenerate (Extended Abstract)
Patrick Bindjeme, James Allen Fill
Abstract
In a continuous-time setting, Fill (2012) proved, for a large class of probabilistic sources, that the number of symbol comparisons used by QuickSort, when centered by subtracting the mean and scaled by dividing by time, has a limiting distribution, but proved little about that limiting random variable Y not even that it is nondegenerate. We establish the nondegeneracy of Y. The proof is perhaps surprisingly difficult.
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