Improved upper bounds on Shellsort (Q1069307)

The running time of Shellsort, with the number of passes restricted to O(log N), was thought for some time to be \(\Theta (N^{3/2})\), due to general results of Pratt. Sedgewick recently gave an \(O(N^{4/3})\) bound, but extensions of his method to provide better bounds seem to require new results on a classical problem in number theory. In this paper, we use a different approach to achieve \(O(N^{1+\epsilon /\sqrt{lg N}})\), for any \(\epsilon >0\).