Bubble Sort Principle Explained with Visual Storytelling and Java Selection Sort Example

Related reading: a comic titled "What is a Distributed Transaction?" ( link ).

Assume we need to obtain an ascending sequence; what is the principle of bubble sort?

As the name suggests, bubble sort repeatedly compares each element with its next neighbor and swaps them if they are out of order, causing larger elements to "bubble" toward the right side of the array.

Each pass moves the current largest element to its final position; after enough passes the unsorted array becomes a sorted ascending sequence.

This is the basic principle of bubble sort.

If we follow the bubble‑sort "coach" metaphor, the sorting process can be visualized as a series of exchanges among students, with the number of swaps indicating algorithmic work.

Frequent element swaps increase memory reads and writes, which degrades runtime performance.

The article also provides a Java implementation of selection sort, another elementary sorting algorithm, with full source code.

public static void selectionSort(int[] array){
    for(int i=0; i<array.length-1; i++){
        int minIndex = i;
        for(int j=i+1; j<array.length; j++){
            minIndex = array[minIndex] < array[j] ? minIndex : j;
        }
        int temp = array[i];
        array[i] = array[minIndex];
        array[minIndex] = temp;
    }
}

public static void main(String[] args){
    int[] array = new int[]{3,4,2,1,5,6,7,8,30,50,1,33,24,5,-4,7,0};
    selectionSort(array);
    System.out.println(java.util.Arrays.toString(array));
}

Running the provided main method prints the sorted array, demonstrating the algorithm in action.