Question

What does the MakeUnionFind(S) operation do in a Union-Find data structure with pointers?

a) Initializes a new set
b) Finds the representative of a set
c) Performs a union operation
d) Deletes a set

Answer 1

The MakeUnionFind(S) operation in a Union-Find data structure initializes a new collection of disjoint single-element sets, each containing one of the elements from the input collection S.

Step-by-step explanation:

The MakeUnionFind(S) operation in a Union-Find data structure with pointers is responsible for initializing a new set. This data structure is widely used for tracking a set of elements partitioned into a number of disjoint (non-overlapping) subsets. It provides two primary efficient operations: Find, which returns the representative of the subset that a particular element belongs to, and Union, which merges two subsets into a single subset.

The MakeUnionFind(S) operation takes a collection of n elements as input (often referred to as S) and creates n single-element sets, each with a unique label. Each element becomes a representative of its own single-element subset. Initially, these subsets are all disjoint since each subset contains only one element. After the creation of single-element sets, the Union and Find operations can then be used to merge sets and query the representative elements, respectively.