Priority Queues and Heaps Study Guide

Priority Queue. A Max Priority Queue (or PQ for short) is an ADT that supports at least the insert and delete-max operations. A MinPQ supports insert and delete-min.

Heap. A max (or min) heap is an array representation of a binary tree such that every node is larger (or smaller) than all of its children. This definition naturally applies recursively, i.e. a heap of height 5 is composed of two heaps of height 4 plus a parent.

Tree Representations. Know that there are many ways to represent a tree. Because heaps are complete trees, we prefer to use represent them with arrays. This leads to better real-world performance than using nodes. (More on this later.)

Recommend Problems

1. [Textbook 2.4.21] Explain how to use a priority queue to implement the stack and queue data types.
2. [Adapted from Textbook 2.4.27] Add a min() method to a maximum-oriented PQ. Your implementation should use constant time and constant extra space.
3. Design a data type that supports insert in O(log N) time, delete-the-max in O(log N) time, and delete-the-minimum in O(log N) time.
4. Q3d from CSE 373 19au MT (Solution)
5. Q2f from CSE 373 19au Final (Solution)
6. Q8a, Q8c from CS 61B 16sp MT2 (Solution)
7. Q2 from CS 61BL 19su MT2 (Solution)