How does merge sort work visually?

Can you explain how merge sort works with a visualization?

Sure! Merge sort is a divide-and-conquer algorithm that splits an array into halves, sorts them, and merges them back.

Can you show me a step-by-step visualization of the merge sort process?

Absolutely! Imagine an array: [38, 27, 43, 3, 9, 82, 10]. First, we split it into [38, 27, 43] and [3, 9, 82, 10].

What happens after the split?

Next, we recursively split each half until we have single-element arrays: [38], [27], [43], [3], [9], [82], [10]. Then we start merging.

How do the merging steps look?

We merge [38] and [27] to get [27, 38], then merge that with [43] to get [27, 38, 43]. This continues until we have a fully sorted array.