KS

[goblineer]

Heaps Practice

Congratulations! You're submitting your assignment!

Comprehension Questions

Question	Answer
How is a Heap different from a Binary Search Tree?	Heaps are more efficient to build in the real world, as all BSTs worth their salt are self-balancing and creating them is, therefore, O(_n_Log(n) in time complexity (and requires extra space for pointers and for balancing markers eg, redness/blackness). That said, since a BST is laterally consistent, there's a bunch of extremely common use cases in which BST is a better bet (printing out all the nodes in sorted order is one example).
Could you build a heap with linked nodes?	Sure, but don't. Comparisons are cheaper with integer keys.
Why is adding a node to a heap an O(log n) operation?	Because it relies on the heap_up function to tidy up after the insertion.
Were the heap_up & heap_down methods useful? Why?	It would be a freaking disaster to implement a heap without sifting. Maybe if you got extremely lucky, your array would already be in the right order and ... no, honestly, I still can't figure that out. There is literally no way to create a heap without shifting. That's the whole point of heaps.

[CheezItMan]

Kate! It's good to hear from you... sort of. Not bad, but see my comments on Heapsort & the time /space complexities of your Heap methods.

Let me know if you have questions.

[goblineer]

Updated to reflect code review comments, corrected space complexity error.