In this module, we discuss Dynamic Arrays: a way of using arrays when it is unknown ahead-of-time how many elements will be needed. Here, we also discuss amortized analysis: a method of determining the amortized cost of an operation over a sequence of operations. Amortized analysis is very often used to analyse performance of algorithms when the straightforward analysis produces unsatisfactory results, but amortized analysis helps to show that the algorithm is actually efficient. It is used both for Dynamic Arrays analysis and will also be used in the end of this course to analyze Splay trees.

We start this module by considering priority queues which are used to efficiently schedule jobs, either in the context of a computer operating system or in real life, to sort huge files, which is the most important building block for any Big Data processing algorithm, and to efficiently compute shortest paths in graphs, which is a topic we will cover in our next course. For this reason, priority queues have built-in implementations in many programming languages, including C++, Java, and Python. We will see that these implementations are based on a beautiful idea of storing a complete binary tree in an array that allows to implement all priority queue methods in just few lines of code. We will then switch to disjoint sets data structure that is used, for example, in dynamic graph connectivity and image processing. We will see again how simple and natural ideas lead to an implementation that is both easy to code and very efficient. By completing this module, you will be able to implement both these data structures efficiently from scratch.

In this module you will learn about very powerful and widely used technique called hashing. Its applications include implementation of programming languages, file systems, pattern search, distributed key-value storage and many more. You will learn how to implement data structures to store and modify sets of objects and mappings from one type of objects to another one. You will see that naive implementations either consume huge amount of memory or are slow, and then you will learn to implement hash tables that use linear memory and work in O(1) on average! In the end, you will learn how hash functions are used in modern disrtibuted systems and how they are used to optimize storage of services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Yandex Disk!

In this module we study binary search trees, which are a data structure for doing searches on dynamically changing ordered sets. You will learn about many of the difficulties in accomplishing this task and the ways in which we can overcome them. In order to do this you will need to learn the basic structure of binary search trees, how to insert and delete without destroying this structure, and how to ensure that the tree remains balanced.

In this module we continue studying binary search trees. We study a few non-trivial applications. We then study the new kind of balanced search trees - Splay Trees. They adapt to the queries dynamically and are optimal in many ways.