this is my first question so I hope I haven't broken any rules. I have finally just managed to write code for the Radix Sort algorithm but I am wondering if I have done it wrong. What makes me think that is that my algorithm looks of complexity O(n^3) but Radix Sort is notoriously a O(k.n) algorithm. Am I calculating the complexity of my algorithm wrong or did I just write really bad code?
private static void radixSort(int[] A){
ArrayList<Integer>[] bucket = new ArrayList[10];
int maxNumberOfDigits = 0;
for(int number : A){
if(numberOfDigitsIn(number) > maxNumberOfDigits) maxNumberOfDigits = numberOfDigitsIn(number);
}
for(int c=0; c<bucket.length; c++){
bucket[c] = new ArrayList<Integer>();
}
int i = 0;
int digit;
int j;
while(i < maxNumberOfDigits){
for(j = 0; j<A.length; j++){
digit = getDigit(A[j], i);
bucket[digit].add(A[j]);
}
int index = 0;
for(int z = 0; z<bucket.length; z++){
for (int k=0; k<bucket[z].size(); k++){
A[index] = bucket[z].get(k);
index += 1;
}
bucket[z].clear();
}
i += 1;
}
}
The methods getDigit() and numberOfDigitsIn() are of constant time.
for(int z = 0; z<bucket.length; z++){ for (int k=0; k<bucket[z].size(); k++){
The crucial thing here is that the sum total of all the bucket sizes will equal n, so these loops combined only take O(n). The loop over j takes O(n), and the while loop on i will run for maxNumberOfDigits iterations, and that number represents k in the O(kn) runtime you described. So the total is, in fact, O(kn).