Min Heap

What is a Heap?

A heap is a complete binary tree stored in an array that satisfies the heap property — in a min-heap every parent is smaller than or equal to its children, giv…

What is Prim's Algorithm?

Prim's algorithm builds a minimum spanning tree by growing a single connected tree from an arbitrary start vertex, at each step adding the cheapest edge that c…

What is the A* Search Algorithm?

A* search finds the shortest path between two specific nodes by combining Dijkstra's guaranteed-shortest exploration with a heuristic estimate of remaining dis…

What is a Min-Heap?

A min-heap is a complete binary tree, usually stored as an array, where every parent node is less than or equal to its children, guaranteeing the smallest elem…

How Do You Find the Kth Largest Element in an Array?

The kth largest element can be found in average O(n) time using quickselect, a partition-based algorithm derived from quicksort that only recurses into the sid…

How Do You Merge K Sorted Linked Lists?

K sorted linked lists are merged efficiently in O(N log k) time by using a min-heap of size k that always holds the current head of each list, repeatedly poppi…

How Do You Solve the Meeting Rooms Problem?

The meeting rooms problem asks for the minimum number of rooms needed to host a set of meetings, and it is solved by separating start and end times into two so…

What is the Huffman Coding Algorithm?

Huffman coding is a greedy algorithm that builds an optimal prefix-free binary code by repeatedly merging the two least-frequent symbols into a new tree node,…

What is External Sorting?

External sorting is a family of algorithms for sorting data too large to fit in main memory, most commonly external merge sort: split the data into memory-size…