Sarah Jane Olivas - Spruce - C16

[sjolivas]

Heaps Practice

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Comprehension Questions

Question	Answer
How is a Heap different from a Binary Search Tree?	BST is weakly ordered, heap is not
Could you build a heap with linked nodes?	yes, but implementing a linked-list would make the operation less efficient since we would have to check each node for it's next link rather than accessing elements directly like when using an array.
Why is adding a node to a heap an O(log n) operation?	In the worst case, we need one swap at each level of the tree. So the total number of the swaps would be equal to the height of the heap tree. The height of a balanced complete tree with n number of nodes is logn. Each swap takes O(1) time
Were the heap_up & heap_down methods useful? Why?	yes, very. They are what put everything back in order.

[anselrognlie]

💫 Overall, a nice implementation, Sarah. For the comprehension questions, we can say that a heap is weakly ordered. There is an ordering property, but it's less strict that the left-right ordering of a BST. And while we could use a linked list for our implementation, this would be much less efficient, since we could not access elements directly via index.

The implementation of heap_down appears to share some code with the instructor solution. As such, I don't feel I can fully evaluate your approach to that implementation. As a result, I am giving the overall implementation a yellow. Yellow does not require a resubmission.

Please let me know if you'd like to discuss this further, or feel free to submit a new implementation for heap_down and I'll re-evaluate.

🟡