What technique is commonly used in Disjoint Set Union to optimize the 'Find' ope
Practice Questions
Q1
What technique is commonly used in Disjoint Set Union to optimize the 'Find' operation?
Binary Search
Path Compression
Merge Sort
Heapify
Questions & Step-by-Step Solutions
What technique is commonly used in Disjoint Set Union to optimize the 'Find' operation?
Step 1: Understand that Disjoint Set Union (DSU) is a data structure that keeps track of a set of elements partitioned into disjoint (non-overlapping) subsets.
Step 2: Know that the 'Find' operation is used to determine which subset a particular element belongs to.
Step 3: Realize that in a basic implementation, the 'Find' operation can be slow if the tree structure is deep.
Step 4: Learn about Path Compression, which is a technique that helps to make the 'Find' operation faster.
Step 5: When you call 'Find' on an element, Path Compression flattens the tree structure by making all nodes point directly to the root of the tree.
Step 6: This means that future 'Find' operations will be faster because they will have fewer nodes to traverse.