PrintableCharts
INSERTION SORT

1 / 3 · mockup · corridor-glass

INSERTION SORT

the way cards are ordered in the hand · the trace of one real run

Built as a memo rather than a table: the thing worth hanging it up for reads across the room, with the full reference in smaller type below it.

Three sizes in one archive — from a sheet on the fridge to a poster on the wall.

Premium$2.50

Payment and email are handled by Paddle. The download link arrives by email — no account, no password.

Formats
A4 · A3 · A2
What you get
Print-ready PDFs, one per size, with every letterform converted to outlines — nothing to install, nothing to shift.
Subject
code · beginners · memo · study

The trace and every number here come from running the algorithm itself on the array shown; comparisons are counted during the run rather than taken from a formula.

ON NEARLY SORTED DATA IT BEATS EVERYTHING

Insertion sort is called slow, and that is true only of disorder. On 64 reversed numbers it makes 2016 comparisons; on 64 already sorted ones, 63 — one per element.

That is why real library sorts do not avoid it but finish with it: Timsort, in Python and in Java, first looks for stretches that are already in order, merges those, and picks up the short tails with insertion sort.

So "which algorithm is faster" is half a question. The other half is: on what data. A sorted array is not a rarity but the ordinary case.

On the sheet

  • The trace and every number here come from running the algorithm itself on the array shown; comparisons are counted during the run rather than taken from a formula.
  • Colour carries meaning, but meaning never rests on colour alone — the sheet reads in black and white.
  • Nothing about how it was made: the sheet carries only what the reader needs.

Printing

  • Three sizes in the archive: A4 — 210×297 mm, A3 — 297×420 mm, A2 — 420×594 mm.
  • All text is converted to outlines. No fonts to install, and nothing shifts on another machine.
  • White background and sparing fills — it prints on a home printer without draining the cartridge.
  • Margins of at least 10 mm: a home printer cannot print to the edge.
  • No stroke thinner than 0.3 mm, so nothing disappears in print.

Why the numbers can be trusted. Every countable number here is computed from data rather than typed in, and the sheet must pass 4 independent checks before it is allowed to build — how many items there are, the order they come in, and the claim in the highlighted box itself. If one fails, there is no file.

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