InterviewQuestion: Union–Find

1. Social network connectivity. Given a social network containing nn members and a log file containing mm timestamps at which times pairs of members formed friendships, design an algorithm to determine the earliest time at which all members are connected (i.e., every member is a friend of a friend of a friend … of a friend). Assume that the log file is sorted by timestamp and that friendship is an equivalence relation. The running time of your algorithm should be m \log nmlogn or better and use extra space proportional to nn.

Hint: union−find.

2. Union-find with specific canonical element. Add a method **find()**to the union-find data type so that find(i) returns the largest element in the connected component containing ii. The operations, union(), connected(), and find() should all take logarithmic time or better. For example, if one of the connected components is {1, 2, 6, 9} then the find() method should return 99 for each of the four elements in the connected components.

maintain an extra array to the weighted quick-union data structure that stores for each root i,  i the large element in the connected component containing i

3. Successor with delete. Given a set of nn integers S = { 0, 1, … , n-1 } and a sequence of requests of the following form:

• Remove xx from SS
• Find the successor of xx: the smallest y in S such that y≥x.

design a data type so that all operations (except construction) take logarithmic time or better in the worst case.

 use the modification of the union−find data discussed in the previous question.