Merge Sort

Merge Strategy Visualization

Watch the recursive breakdown and linear merge

Frame:1 / 102

Target Segment

Speed1x

Array Size12

Tree Context

Current DepthLevel 0

Phaseenter

Current Action

Entering segment of length 12 (indices 0 to 11)

Merge Logic In Detail

Pseudocode

1function mergeSort(arr):
2  if length(arr) <= 1: return arr
3  mid = length(arr) // 2
4  left = mergeSort(arr[0:mid])
5  right = mergeSort(arr[mid:])
6  return merge(left, right)

Key Observations

Notice how the array is split until it reaches size 1 segments.
The Linear Merge step uses two pointers to efficiently combine sorted lists.
Unlike Quicksort, Merge Sort's tree is always perfectly balanced.