FAQ: Heapsort: Python - Heapify Down III

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This community-built FAQ covers the “Heapify Down III” exercise from the lesson “Heapsort: Python”.

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This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

Computer Science

FAQs on the exercise Heapify Down III

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2

For the fourth task, the lesson didn’t let me use parallel assignment to do this:

if parent < child:
  self.heap_list[idx] = child
  self.heap_list[larger_child_idx] = parent

I copied the code and then deleted it to pass.

1 Like
3

Why in description of general shape of method in pseudocode we get the smallest child and compare it with parent?

Blockquote
starting with our first element…
while there’s at least one child present:
get the smallest child’s index
compare the smallest child with our element
if our element is larger, swap with child
set our element index to be the child

In “Instructions” we get larger child and compare it with child and this is has more logic, as for me

2 Likes
4

I was confused about this myself, so I had a conversation with ChatGPT, which is where I learned that CC likely does it like this to reinforce the concept, because other languages don’t have an elegant tuple unpacking solution like parallel assignment. You have to hard code it like they had you do here. The idea is that you will be able to heapify in any language

5

It looks like the pseudocode has it backwards. I wonder if CC will fix this.

1 Like
6

Right. They wrote code to get the largest child but then in the pseudo-code, they mention the smallest child.

1 Like
7

My understanding is that the pseudo-code needs to be amended as in bold below.

starting with our first element…
while there’s at least one child present:
get the largest child’s index
compare the largest child with our element
if our element is smaller swap with child
set our element index to be the child