While looking into priority queues and binary heaps, I ran across two gems, one of which may not be so widely known. Consider a complete binary tree with nodes sequentially numbered:
You will observe that the parent of every node is the integer division of itself by two. For example, the parent of 11 is 11/2 = 5 (integer division), the parent of 14 is 14/2 = 7 and so on. Way back in 1590 a genealogist used this numbering pattern to organize people’s ancestries, calling it an Ahnentafel . From the article:
The subject ( proband or progenitor ) of the ahnentafel is listed as No. 1, the subject’s father as No. 2 and the mother as No. 3, the paternal grandparents as No. 4 and No. 5 and the maternal grandparents as No. 6 and No. 7, and so on, back through the generations. Apart from No. 1, who can be male or female, all even-numbered persons are male, and all odd-numbered persons are female. In this schema , the number of any person’s father is double the person’s number, and a person’s mother is double the person’s number plus one. Using this definition of numeration, one can derive some basic information about individuals who are listed without additional research.
This construct displays a person’s genealogy compactly, without the need for a diagram such as a family tree . It is particularly useful in situations where one may be restricted to presenting a genealogy in plain text, for example, in e-mails or newsgroup articles. In effect, an ahnentafel is a method for storing a binary tree in an array by listing the nodes (individuals) in level-order (in generation order).
Now, suppose we see the exact same complete binary tree and sequential numbering in binary:
Do you notice a striking pattern? The children of any given node are basically the binary of the parent left shifted by one with a 0 or 1 in the new last bit, depending upon whether they are the left or right child. So, for example, the children of 101 are 1010 and 1011. This is the basis for the neat heuristic (which I first came across here ) for finding a given node in this tree when using a pointer-based representation when, for example, inserting or deleting from a binary heap.This pattern, as you have guessed, comes from the number representation and the tree being both binary based.
PS. Pardon my terrible title. The Ahnentafel put “German” in my head, traversing the tree put “left, right” in my head and watching too many world war II movies in childhood did the rest.
PPS. python code to generate the trees, not that you need it.
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt def node_xy(k, n, dx): n0, n1 = 2**k, 2**(k+1)-1 center = (n0 + n1) / 2.0 return (n - center) * dx / n0, 0.5 - k / 10.0 def plot(ax, max_k): dx = 1.0 for k in range(max_k): for n in range(2**k, 2**(k+1)): x, y = node_xy(k, n, dx) # ax.text(x, y, str(n), ha='center', va='bottom') ax.text(x, y, bin(n)[2:], ha='center', va='bottom') if k: px, py = node_xy(k - 1, int(n/2), dx) plt.plot([px, x], [py, y + 0.025], 'k') fig = plt.figure() ax = plt.subplot(111) plot(ax, 5) plt.setp(ax, xlim=[-0.5, 0.5], ylim=[0.0, 0.6]) plt.axis('off')