Topics for Park's CMSC 341 Sections' Final Exam:

1. The final exam is cummulative: you should also review the topics listed in the study guides for the two previous midterm exams.
2. Leftist heaps
   • How it differs from a regular min- or max-heap
   • Null path length
   • Insertions and swings
   • Merges and deletions in leftist heaps
3. Sorting
   • General: Should be able to describe and discuss each algorithm's runtime, whether they can be easily implemented as an in-place version, and why they are still relevant.
   • Selection Sort
     • Pros: Simple, can be implemented in-place
     • Cons: slow
   • Heap Sort
     • Pros: Built on existing ADT (the heap), good performance, can be in-place
     • Cons: Other O(n log n) algorithms might be faster
   • Merge Sort
     • Pros: Good performance, good for large disk-based data sets
     • Cons: hard to do in-place
     • Quicksort
       • Pros: Excellent average case performance, can be in-place
       • Cons: has worst-case O(n-squared) performance
   • Average Running Time
     • Only need to understand at broad conceptual level; Why do we consider:
       • best case
       • worst case
       • average case
     • What is "expected value"?
     • Why is it important to be able to define a distribution over possible inputs?
   • Disjoint Sets
     • What they are
     • The 3 basic operations: Find(), Union(), and MakeSet()
     • Two types: array based and tree based
     • How to do basic operations with each type
     • Internal implemention: creating tree-based disjoint sets using arrays
     • Optimization:
       • Union-by-rank (size)
       • Union-by-rank (height)
       • Path compression
     • General performance

As always, not all of these topics will be be specifically asked about on the exam, obviously, but you are responsible for knowing it.