quickselect

Quickselect is an efficient method used to find the k-th smallest element in an unsorted list. It works similarly to quicksort by choosing a "pivot" to partition the list into smaller and larger elements. If the pivot's position matches the desired k-th position, the algorithm returns it immediately. If not, it recursively searches only the relevant section of the list, reducing the problem size each time. This targeted approach makes Quickselect faster than sorting the entire list when only a specific order statistic is needed, often operating in linear time on average.