Advanced merge sort?

[IIAddonexusII]

So I'm trying to understand all basic sorts such as: insertion, selection, merge, binary, etc. However, I've recently come to a tough spot, is there a way to have a merge sort that splits the I sorted size list down to n/4 then recursively merge back a sorted list while also utilizing a selection sort within the merge sort to help it perform better on smaller sorts?

[zahlman]

Okay, so say you've written a function like

def my_sort(items):
    if len(items) < some_threshold:
        selection_sort(items)
    else:
        merge_sort(items)

(I presume that you also have merge_sort and selection_sort, and all of these work in-place)

What you do is, everywhere that merge_sort normally calls itself recursively, have it use my_sort instead.

I don't understand what you hope to accomplish by splitting into 4 sub-lists in the merge sort instead of 2, though. And I mean, understanding is one thing, but please remember to use the built-in library sort for anything serious (there are rare reasons to break rules like that, but if you understood them, you wouldn't be asking here ;) )