heap (data structure)とは 意味・読み方・使い方

In computer science, a heap is a specialized tree-based data structure that satisfies the heap property: if B is a child node of A, then key(A) ≥ key(B). This implies that an element with the greatest key is always in the root node, and so such a heap is sometimes called a max-heap. (Alternatively, if the comparison is reversed, the smallest element is always in the root node, which results in a min-heap.) There is no restriction as to how many children each node has in a heap, although in practice each node has at most two. The heap is one maximally-efficient implementation of an abstract data type called a priority queue. Heaps are crucial in several efficient graph algorithms such as Dijkstra's algorithm, and in the sorting algorithm heapsort.