Heaps and Priority Queues
Students will learn to create and use simple functions to group related instructions, making programs more organized and easier to manage.
Key Questions
- Prove that the build-heap procedure runs in O(n) time rather than O(n log n) using an amortised argument over the levels of the heap.
- Trace the sift-up and sift-down operations on a max-heap during insertion and extract-max, and derive the O(log n) complexity of each operation.
- Design an application requiring a priority queue—such as a task scheduler or Dijkstra's algorithm—and justify why a binary heap is the appropriate underlying structure compared to a sorted list.
MOE Syllabus Outcomes
Suggested Methodologies
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