Strategies for Stable Merge Sorting

We introduce new stable, natural merge sort algorithms, called 2-merge sort and $\alpha$-merge sort. We prove upper and lower bounds for several merge sort algorithms, including Timsort, Shiver's sort, $\alpha$-stack sorts, and our new 2-merge and $\alpha$-merge sorts. The upper and lower bounds have the forms $c \cdot n \log m$ and $c \cdot n \log n$ for inputs of length $n$ comprising $m$ runs. For Timsort, we prove a lower bound of $ (1.5 - o(1)) n \log n $. For 2-merge sort, we prove optimal upper and lower bounds of approximately $ (1.089 \pm o(1))n \log m $. We prove similar asymptotically matching upper and lower bounds for $\alpha$-merge sort, when $\varphi < \alpha < 2$, where $\varphi$ is the golden ratio. These merge strategies can be used for any stable merge sort, not just natural merge sorts. The new 2-merge and $\alpha$-merge sorts have better worst-case merge cost upper bounds and are slightly simpler to implement than the widely-used Timsort; they also perform better in experiments.