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We'll now look at sorting, since we will need to be able to sort an array to use binary search. As we will see, sorting takes a fair amount of time, but if we are going to be searching a large array a lot, the savings obtained by using binary search over linear will more than make up for the cost of sorting the array once.
Suppose our goal is to take a shuffled deck of cards and to sort it in ascending order. We'll ignore suits, so there is a four-way tie at each rank.
Describing a sorting algorithm precisely can be difficult. Let's consider a few.
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