Read-backward polyphase sorting

ABSTRACT

Read-backward Polyphase sorting provides more efficient use of the tapes available to a sort than most other sorting techniques. Backward Polyphase produces a continuous merging process from n - 1 tapes where n is the total number of tapes being used in the sorting process. Any of the available presorting techniques may be used in conjunction with the Polyphase merge sort provided that the presort has the capability of producing both ascending and descending strings and distributing the strings on the various tapes as required by the Polyphase Merge.

REFERENCES

• 1: B. K. Betz , W. C. Carter, New merge sorting techniques, Preprints of papers presented at the 14th national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery, September 01-03, 1959, Cambridge, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/612201.612219]
• 2: GILSTAD, R. L. Polyphase merge sorting-an advanced technique. Proc. EJCC 1960, 143-48.
• 3: W. David Malcolm, Jr., String distribution for the polyphase sort, Communications of the ACM, v.6 n.5, p.217-220, May 1963 [doi>10.1145/366552.366560]
• 4: Sheldon Sobel, Oscillating Sort—A New Sort Merging Technique, Journal of the ACM (JACM), v.9 n.3, p.372-374, July 1962 [doi>10.1145/321127.321133]