I've been obsessed with sorting over the last few weeks as I write a python C-extension implementing a lazily-sorted list. Among the many algorithms that this lazily-sorted list implements is quickselect, which finds the kth smallest element in a list in expected linear time. To examine the performance of this implementation, I decided to plot the time it takes to compute the median of a random list divided by the length of the list. Theoretically, since quickselect runs in expected linear time, this plot should be roughly constant. In fact, this is what the plot looks like:
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