In "The Art of Computer Programming", Donald E. Knuth discussed a number of lower bounds for the number of comparisons required to locate the "t" smallest entries of an unorganized list of "n" items (using only comparisons). There is a trivial lower bound of "n" − 1 for the minimum or maximum entry. To see this, consider a tournament where each game represents one comparison. Since every player except the winner of the tournament must lose a game before we know the winner, we have a lower bound of "n" − 1 comparisons.