You'll also notice that this thing goes through the entire list, even if the list is sorted before it gets partway through.

你也能注意到，它始终会遍历列表,甚至列表在排序之前,就是有序的也是这样。

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选

I haven't said how I'm going to get those sorted lists, but imagine I had two sorted lists like that.

我还没有说明我怎么才能得到已排序的列表,但是想像一下我现在已经有,两个已排序好序的列表了。

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选

If it was an unordered list, we were basically stuck with linear search. Got to walk through the whole list to see if the thing is there.

如果是一个未排序的列表,基本上我们就只能使用线性搜索了,通过遍历整个列表来查看。

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选

Merge sort takes this idea of divide and conquer, and it does the following: it says let's divide the list in half.

归并排序以如下的步骤使用了分治思想：,把列表分成两半：,下面就是分治。

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选

Well let's see. My fall back is, I could just do linear search, walk down the list one at a time, just comparing those things. OK. So that's sort of my base. But what if I wanted, you know, how do I want to get to that sorted list? All right?

我只能做线性搜索了,一次遍历一遍列表，一个一个比较，但如果我想要,那怎样得到有序的列表呢？,现在的一个问题是，我们排序之前？

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选

So to just preface what we're going to do next time, what would happen if I wanted to do sort, and rather than in sorting the entire list at once, I broke it into pieces, and sorted the pieces, and then just figured out a very efficient way to bring those two pieces and merge them back together again?

所以为了引导下一次,我们要讲的内容,如果我想做排序,而且不是一次吧整个列表排完,会发生什么，我把它拆成小的列表,然后把各个小列表排序,接着用高效的方法再把小的列表？

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选