Explain why the cost of splitting a list of six into two lists of three to find the minimum and maximum elements requires eight comparisons, while splitting the list into a list of two and a list of...

Explain why the cost of splitting a list of six into two lists of three to find the minimum and maximum elements requires eight comparisons, while splitting the list into a list of two and a list of four costs only seven comparisons.

Present an adversary argument as a lower bounds proof to show that n − 1 comparisons are necessary to find the maximum of n values in the worst case.