This community-built FAQ covers the “Translating Parent and Child Elements Into Indices” exercise from the lesson “Heaps: Python”.
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This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:
Computer Science
Complex Data Structures
FAQs on the exercise Translating Parent and Child Elements Into Indices
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How would we a represent a heap that, somewhere in the middle of it, a node only has one child but that child has two children itself? For example, if we had the following heap:
…0…
…1…|…2…
…3…4 |… 5…
…|…6… 7
How would we represent it as a list? I tried but I got the following [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ?, 6, 7]
What goes in the ‘?’
This also makes it tough to use the parent, left_child, and right_child methods. Please help.
1 Like
Unlike a tree, a heap is not defined by designated parent-child relationships, but is purposely constructed top-to-bottom, and left-to-right, so that the indexing scheme holds and the remove or add algorithm maintains the min or max structure of the heap.
In other words, as far as I can see, the situation you describe would never arise with a heap. After 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 were added to your heap, 6 would be forced to occupy the position next to 5 as the rightmost child of 2, and 7 would be the leftmost child of 3.
5 Likes
Could anyone explain to me why the parent index of index 4 is 2?
This is only the case when your root index is 1. When the root index is 0, the parent of index 4 is 1:
0
1 2
3 4 5 6
And according to the exercise they are using root index 0:
print(heap.heap_list)
[None, 10, 13, 21, 61, 22, 23, 99]
Indices: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
Yet with the arithmetic for a root index 1 heap:
- Parent:
index // 2
- Left Child:
index * 2
- Right Child:
(index * 2) + 1
Or am I missing something? Am I completely off base here?!?
1 Like
I am wondering the same thing. Can anyone shed light on this please?
1 Like
The tree is actually
1
2 3
4 5 6
The first index is None and should actually be ignored. In other websites it seems conventional to not even have None in the index. The root is at index 1 with the value 10.
So yes, you were literally “off base” lol.
