Coursear week4: Interview Questions: Priority Queues

Dynamic median.

Design a data type that supports insert in logarithmic time, find-the-median in constant time, and remove-the-median in logarithmic time. If the number of keys in the data type is even, find/remove the lower median.

Note: these interview questions are ungraded and purely for your own enrichment. To get a hint, submit a solution.

Hint: maintain two binary heaps, one that is max-oriented and one that is min-oriented.

Randomized priority queue.

Describe how to add the methods \mathtt{sample()}sample() and \mathtt{delRandom()}delRandom() to our binary heap implementation. The two methods return a key that is chosen uniformly at random among the remaining keys, with the latter method also removing that key. The \mathtt{sample()}sample() method should take constant time; the \mathtt{delRandom()}delRandom() method should take logarithmic time. Do not worry about resizing the underlying array.
Hint: use ink() and swim().

Taxicab numbers.

A taxicab number is an integer that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes of positive integers in two different ways: a^3 + b^3 = c^3 + d^3a