Lecture 20

Learning Outcomes

At the end of this lecture, you’ll be able to:

• Describe what Priority Queue is and how it is different from standard Queue.
• Describe how “natural ordering” of objects is established in Java.
• Explain the difference between Comparable and Comparator interfaces.
• Describe the core operations of Priority Queue.
• Enumerate the structure and order properties of binary heap.
• Differentiate binary search trees from binary heaps.
• Explain and trace the core operations of Priority Queue with Binary Heap implementation.
• Understand the operations of Priority Queue with Binary Heap well enough to implement it.
• Contrast efficiency of alternative implementation approaches (e.g. sorted/unsorted sequence vs binary heap).
• Explain how a binary heap can be represented using a (ranked) array.