This video describes the principle of the quicksort, which takes a ‘divide and conquer’ approach to the problem of sorting an unordered list. In this particular algorithm, the approach to partitioning a list does not rely on the explicit nomination of a pivot value, but still makes use of left and right pointers that advance towards each other. Items at the positions of the pointers are compared and if necessary swapped, so that the smaller of the two items is at the left pointer and the larger of the two is at the right pointer. This continues until the item that was originally at the right hand side of the list finds itself in the correct position. In other words, the item that was originally at the right hand side of the list is the pivot value. This video also includes a description of some pseudocode for this particular quicksort algorithm.