Abstract
The central result of this paper is that all Shellsort sorting networks based on monotonically decreasing increments require ~t(N log 2 N/log log N) comparators. This result is significant because previously only the trivial fl(N log N) bound was known for this class of networks. Thus this paper provides the first proof that such networks cannot be of optimal size. The lower bound obtained in this paper nearly matches the upper bound of O(N log 2 N) that was proven by Pratt.

This publication has 8 references indexed in Scilit: