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A-Level Computer Science Project AQA

For my project I need to store the highest scores for the game, I need a sorting algorithm to do that. I figured out that insertion sort will be the best option for that. But I could also use merge sort(or o many others) which is in band A for the programming marking criteria. What should I use???
Seems like very difficult stuff :/
If you were doing this not for coursework I'd personally use the inbuilt sorting function of whatever language you are using as this would almost certainly be the most efficient, however to score better on the complexity it'd be a good place to implement your own sorting algorithm. Looking at the mark scheme, a merge sort would probably look the most impressive as recursive algorithms are generally thought of as more complex.

Have you covered recursive algorithms yet in the theory section of your lessons? If so you can probably easily adapt the algorithm from one of the exam questions or the teaching resources. Or you can just look up examples that other people have created. (Although the examples in the text book to me seem needlessly complex, and I prefer a method where two functions are used one for division and one for merging)
Reply 3
Original post by Faction Paradox
If you were doing this not for coursework I'd personally use the inbuilt sorting function of whatever language you are using as this would almost certainly be the most efficient, however to score better on the complexity it'd be a good place to implement your own sorting algorithm. Looking at the mark scheme, a merge sort would probably look the most impressive as recursive algorithms are generally thought of as more complex.

Have you covered recursive algorithms yet in the theory section of your lessons? If so you can probably easily adapt the algorithm from one of the exam questions or the teaching resources. Or you can just look up examples that other people have created. (Although the examples in the text book to me seem needlessly complex, and I prefer a method where two functions are used one for division and one for merging)

In a real world scenario it wouldn't matter as you'll only have a few scores but for marks I agree with the notion that a merge sort is the best call.
Original post by AmmarTa
In a real world scenario it wouldn't matter as you'll only have a few scores but for marks I agree with the notion that a merge sort is the best call.


Well I mean it's always good practise to make all code as efficient as possible, but yeah for small numbers of items to be sorted it probably doesn't make much odds :P

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