Recommendation

Not Recommended

Link

http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/~holder/courses/cse2320/lectures/applets/binheap/applet.html

Delivery Method

Java Applet

License

Unavailable

Language

English

Author

Larry Holder?

Institution

Washington State University

Project

StandAlone

RelationshipToProject

StandAlone

Works

Yes

Description

This is a bare-bones binomial heap visualization. The main functionality is node insertion. The user can enter a unique number or accept the default (1 more than the last entry). The visualization maintains two heaps, and there is a control to determine into which heap the number is inserted. In addition, there are options to display the minimum value, extract the minimum value from the heap and to merge the two heaps. The visualization itself is a drawing of the heaps. There is no animation to indicate process - the drawing just snaps to the new state. In addition, there is a section labeled "Binary repres" (presumably due to some poor placement) that shows binary sums during the insertions and merges.

Evaluation

While there is no information on the linked page, examination of the URL leads one to suspect that this (and the rest of the collection) were created to help as lecture aids. As such, there is no actual information included with the visualization. While it shows the structure of the binomial heaps, there is nothing here that could be used to figure out the implementation details or performance metrics. I don't know what the binary sums part of the visualization is for, but presumably it was making a point during the lecture. The visualization itself is fairly poor. The graph layout is fairly reasonable, but the graphics are rough and they flicker. Any change to the dimensions of the webpage and they vanish, indicating a refresh issue. I initially thought that the 'display min' and 'extract min' buttons were broken until I realized that the display of the minimum value was done in the status bar at the bottom of the browser (why not just highlight it?) and that the extract min was very slow. Another gripe is that there is no reset functionality, to clear the heap one has to extract all of the values or reload the page. It is possible that one could use it as a running example during a lecture as it maintains the location of all of the items in the heap, which would be time consuming on a chalkboard, but it is potentially useful for much more than that.

ActivityLevel

GoodFor

Lecture Aid

Screenshots

Videos

References

HowToUse

First Visited

2008

Last Visited

2008-04-24

Last Updated

1999

Topic

BinomialHeaps

Community

Edit

You may edit this entry if you have an account.