CST 370 Week 6

This week I learned more about heaps, hash tables, AVL trees, and 2-3 trees. I had seen heaps, chaining, and AVL trees before, so those topics were helpful refreshers. Heaps were interesting because they maintain a specific relationship between parent and child nodes, allowing the smallest or largest value to be accessed efficiently. Reviewing AVL trees also helped reinforce how rotations are used to keep the tree balanced. I had also learned about chaining in hash tables before, but linear probing was new to me. It was interesting to compare how chaining stores multiple values at the same index while linear probing searches for the next available position when a collision occurs.

The other new concept for me was 2-3 trees. I found them interesting because each node can store more than one value and can have either two or three children. It was also helpful to see how nodes split when they become too full and how this process keeps the tree balanced. Overall, this week’s material gave me a good mix of reviewing familiar concepts and learning new ways to organize and retrieve data efficiently.