Recommendation

Has Potential

Link

http://www.animal.ahrgr.de/showAnimationDetails.php3?anim=39

Delivery Method

Animal Animation

License

Non-Commercial

Language

English; German

Author

Marc-Daniel Haunschild

Institution

TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

Project

Animal

RelationshipToProject

PartOfProject

Works

Yes

Description

Presents a slideshow walking through an example of mergesort.

Evaluation

Generally clear visualization, with one important caveat. This does not implement the standard "simple" mergesort, but rather an optimized variant where the right subarray is copied in reverse order, to simplify the stopping criteria. This can be good or bad... it is bad if a student comes to this without proper support about what is going on, since the AV itself does not discuss the issue (there is no supporting description or pseudocode with the AV). It is good for an instructor who wants to be able to demonstrate the optimized version as part of their lecture. Another problem is that only half the array is actually sorted in the example, which could be confusing.

ActivityLevel

Animation; Step Control; Canned Data

GoodFor

Lecture Aid

Screenshots

Videos

References

HowToUse

For detailed instructions on how to install Animal and run Animal AVs, see: http://www.algoanim.info/Animal2/?q=node/290. Once you have installed the Animal .jar file and downloaded/unpacked the .zip file of Animal animations, you are now ready to run Animal. Run the .jar file to start Animal. Then go to the "Open" menu item, and browse to where you put the animal animations you got in the .zip file. Pick this AV from the list. You can then step through the animation, or use "kiosk mode" to have the steps fed to you at a constant pace.

First Visited

2007-07-21

Last Visited

2010-02-05

Last Updated

1999-05-11

Topic

MergeSort

Community

Edit

You may edit this entry if you have an account.