improvement is by no means drasticthe important term is still of the order andin factsorting the already sorted array takes more time than does straight insertion with sequential search this example demonstrates that an "obvious improvementoften has much less drastic consequences than one is first inclined to estimate and that in some cases (that do occurthe "improvementmay actually turn out to be deterioration after allsorting by insertion does not appear to be very suitable method for digital computersinsertion of an item with the subsequent shifting of an entire row of items by single position is uneconomical one should expect better results from method in which moves of items are only performed upon single items and over longer distances this idea leads to sorting by selection sorting by straight selection this method is based on the following principle select the item with the least key exchange it with the first item then repeat these operations with the remaining - itemsthen with - itemsuntil only one item -the largest -is left this method is shown on the same eight keys as in table initial keys = = = = = = = table sample process of straight selection sorting the algorithm is formulated as followsfor : to - do assign the index of the least item of ai an- to kexchange ai with ak end this methodcalled straight selectionis in some sense the opposite of straight insertionstraight insertion considers in each step only the one next item of the source sequence and all items of the destination array to find the insertion pointstraight selection considers all items of the source array to find the one with the least key and to be deposited as the one next item of the destination sequence procedure straightselectionvar ijkintegerxitembegin for : to - do :ix : [ ]for : + to - do if [jx then :jx : [kend enda[ : [ ] [ : (adens _sorts *