My co-workers took me back in time to my University days with a discussion of sorting algorithms this morning. We reminisced about our favorites like StupidSort, and one of us was sure we had seen a sort algorithm that was O(n!). That got me started looking around for the “worst” sorting algorithms I could find.
We postulated that a completely random sort would be pretty bad (i.e. randomize the elements – is it in order? no? randomize again), and I looked around and found out that it’s apparently called BogoSort, or Monkey Sort, or sometimes just Random Sort.
Monkey Sort appears to have a worst case performance of O(∞), a best case performance of O(n), and an average performance of O(n·n!).
What is the currently official accepted sorting algorithm with the worst average sorting performance (and there fore beeing worse than O(n·n!))?
