Whenever I’m trying to get back into the swing of building and optimizing and evaluating algorithms, my first step is always to write a whole bunch of sorting implementations. I’m also trying to improve my knowledge of the core syntax of python. So here are four sorts in python: insertion, merge, heap, and quick. (The insertion and heap sort implementations are both in-place. The other two are not.)

The second step is probably going to be to implement a data structure I’ve never done before. Last time, it was a min-max heap in PHP. I’m thinking maybe a B-tree?

Update 3 Sept: Here is my implementation of a splay tree. Far simpler than I remembered, so I challenged myself to do it without parent links in the node objects.