Suggests a moving pictorial tool to help teach principles in the bubble sort algorithm. Develops such a tool applied to an unsorted list of numbers and describes a method to derive the run time of the algorithm. The method can be modified to run the times of various other algorithms. (JN)

ONE OF THE PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED IN CLUSTERING TECHNIQUES AS APPLIED TO DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS USING BIBLIOGRAPHIC COUPLING DEVICES IS THAT THE COMPUTATIONAL EFFORT REQUIRED GROWS ROUGHLY AS THE SQUARE OF THE COLLECTION SIZE. IN THIS STUDY GRAPH THEORY IS APPLIED TO THIS PROBLEM BY FIRST MAPPING THE CITATION GRAPH OF THE DOCUMENT COLLECTION…

Describes eight increasingly sophisticated and efficient sorting algorithms including linear insertion, binary insertion, shellsort, bubble exchange, shakersort, quick sort, straight selection, and tree selection. Provides challenges for the reader and the student to program these efficiently. (JM)