How does merge sort work in practice?

How does merge sort work in practice?

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 example of merge sort?

Sure! Let's say we have the 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?

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

How do we merge them back together?

We compare the elements of the arrays and merge them in sorted order. For example, [27] and [38] become [27, 38]. We repeat this until we have a fully sorted array.