What is a Red-Black Tree?
This lesson is an introduction to Red-Black trees, their properties, and the total time they take to perform the operations of insertion, deletion and searching. We will also make a small comparison between AVL and Red-Black Trees.
We'll cover the following
Introduction #
Red-Black Trees are another type of self-balancing Binary Search Tree, but with some additions: the nodes in Red-Black Trees are colored either red or black. Colored nodes help with re-balancing the tree after insertions or deletions. We will go through the insertion and deletion functions of Red-Black trees just like we did with AVL Trees previously.
Properties of Red-Black Trees #
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Every node is either Red or Black in color
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The root is always colored, Black
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Two Red nodes cannot be adjacent, i.e., No red parent can have a red child and vice versa
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Each path from the root to None contains the same number of Black colored nodes
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The color of NULL nodes is considered Black
From the perspective of implementation, our node class will contain the addition of a boolean variable that will store the information about the color of a node. Here is a basic structure of a Node, which will be used to build a Red-Black tree.
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