Leftist tree
priority queue implemented with a variant of a binary heap
In computer science, a leftist tree or leftist heap is a priority queue implemented with a variant of a binary heap. Every node x has an s-value which is the distance to the nearest leaf in subtree rooted at x. In contrast to a binary heap, a leftist tree attempts to be very unbalanced. In addition to the heap property, leftist trees are maintained so the right descendant of each node has the lower s-value.
The height-biased leftist tree was invented by Clark Allan Crane. The name comes from the fact that the left subtree is usually taller than the right subtree.
A leftist tree is a mergeable heap. When inserting a new node into a tree, a new one-node tree is created and merged into the existing tree. To delete an item, it is replaced by the merge of its left and right sub-trees. Both these operations take O(log n) time.
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This entry incorporates text from “Leftist tree” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.