Revisiting calculation of moments of number of comparisons used by the randomized quick sort algorithm

Abstract

We revisit the method of Kirschenhofer, Prodinger and Tichy to calculate the moments of comparisons used by the quick sort algorithm. We reemphasize that this approach helps in calculating these quantities with less computation. We also point out that as observed by Knuth this method also gives moments for total path length of a binary search tree built over a random set of n keys.