Evelynn

[evelynnkaplan]

Heaps Practice

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Comprehension Questions

Question	Answer
How is a Heap different from a Binary Search Tree?	Binary search trees care both about the order of a parent-child relationship and a sibling relationship between nodes. In heaps, only the parent-child relationship matters. Siblings are never compared to one another.
Could you build a heap with linked nodes?	Yes, you can. I think one advantage of using an array as the underlying data structure is that you could easily look up the children or parent of any node, because look-up time in an array is O(1). Another reason might be that storing pointers for a linked list takes up more space, and pointers are unnecessary for heaps, because looking up the children is always (index + 1) * 2 or (index + 2) * 2.
Why is adding a node to a heap an O(log n) operation?	Adding a node to a heap, in the worst-case scenario, requires swapping a node up the tree with parent nodes until you reach the root node. This only takes as many swaps as there are levels of the tree.
Were the heap_up & heap_down methods useful? Why?	Yes, very useful, because they put elements in order and it was a good look at recursion.

[CheezItMan]

Great work. You hit all the learning goals here. Well done. Take a look at my comments and let me know if you have any questions.

[CheezItMan]

👍

[CheezItMan]

heap_up is recursive and you have to consider that and it's affect on the call stack in terms of space complexity.