Finding Nth item of unsorted list without sorting the list

Question

Hey. I have a very large array and I want to find the Nth largest value. Trivially I can sort the array and then take the Nth element but I\'m only interested in one element

Answer 1

You can iterate the entire sequence maintaining a list of the 5 largest values you find (this will be O(n)). That being said I think it would just be simpler to sort the list.