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by ted_dunning 698 days ago
That's a bullshit question.

My own response would have been a variant on radix-sort. Keep an array of 256 counters, and make a pass counting all of the high bytes. Now you know the high byte of the median. Make another pass keeping a histogram of the second byte of all values that match the high byte. And so on.

This takes four passes and requires 256 x 8 byte counters plus incidentals.

In a single pass you can't get the exact answer.