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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 August 2002
In Hoare's (1961) original version of the algorithm the partitioning element in the central divide-and-conquer step is chosen uniformly at random from the set S in question. Here we consider a variant where this element is the median of a sample of size 2k+1 from S. We investigate convergence in distribution of the number of comparisons required and obtain a simple explicit result for the limiting average performance of the median-of-three version.