disjoint-sets

I am trying to implement Disjoint Sets for use in Kruskal's algorithm, but I am having trouble understanding exactly how it should be done and in particular, how to manage the forest of trees. After reading the Wikipedia description of Disjoint Sets and after reading the description in Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen et al) I have come up with the following: class DisjointSet { public: class Node { public: int data; int rank; Node* parent; Node() : data(0), rank(0), parent(this) { } // the constructor does MakeSet }; Node* find(Node*); Node* merge(Node*, Node*); // Union }; DisjointSet:

Practicing for software developer interviews and got stuck on an algorithm question. Given two sets of unsorted integers with array of length m and other of length n and where m < n find an efficient algorithm to determine if the sets are disjoint. I've found solutions in O(nm) time, but haven't found any that are more efficient than this, such as in O(n log m) time. Using a datastructure that has O(1) lookup/insertion you can easily insert all elements of first set. Then foreach element in second set, if it exists not disjoint, otherwise it is disjoint Pseudocode function isDisjoint(list1,

I need to use boost::disjoint_sets, but the documentation is unclear to me. Can someone please explain what each template parameter means, and perhaps give a small example code for creating a disjoint_sets? As per the request, I am using disjoint_sets to implement Tarjan's off-line least common ancestors algorithm , i.e - the value type should be vertex_descriptor. What I can understand from the documentation : Disjoint need to associate a rank and a parent (in the forest tree) to each element. Since you might want to work with any kind of data you may,for example, not always want to use a map