Introduction to Disjoint-set data structure through UVa 10583 – Ubiquitous Religions
Its been quite a while since I last wrote and I feel terrible about it. So, I have decided that, starting from today, I will try to publish at least one post every week. Through these weekly posts, I will discuss the most interesting algorithmic problem I solved during the week. Some of them, like this one, will be accompanied with an introduction to a new data structure or algorithm I had to learn to solve the problem. Now, lets start disjoint-set data structure without further ado. Lets first analyze the problem and understand why we need disjoint-set data structure. Here is an abridged version of the problem statement ( link to original problem statement ): There are n \((1 \leq n \leq 50000 )\) students in a university and for some given m \(( 0 \leq m \leq \frac{n(n - 1)}{2} )\) pairs of students you know that the students in each pair follow the same religion. Find the maximum number of religions that the students in the university believe in assuming that one student can