Finding last element of a binary heap

Question

quoting Wikipedia:

It is perfectly acceptable to use a traditional binary tree data structure to implement a binary heap. There is an

Answer 1

I know this is an old thread but i was looking for a answer to the same question. But i could not afford to do an o(log n) solution as i had to find the last node thousands of times in a few seconds. I did have a O(log n) algorithm but my program was crawling because of the number of times it performed this operation. So after much thought I did finally find a fix for this. Not sure if anybody things this is interesting.

This solution is O(1) for search. For insertion it is definitely less than O(log n), although I cannot say it is O(1).

Just wanted to add that if there is interest, i can provide my solution as well. The solution is to add the nodes in the binary heap to a queue. Every queue node has front and back pointers.We keep adding nodes to the end of this queue from left to right until we reach the last node in the binary heap. At this point, the last node in the binary heap will be in the rear of the queue. Every time we need to find the last node, we dequeue from the rear,and the second-to-last now becomes the last node in the tree. When we want to insert, we search backwards from the rear for the first node where we can insert and put it there. It is not exactly O(1) but reduces the running time dramatically.