An Immediate Approach to Balancing Nodes of Binary Search Trees

We present an immediate approach in hoping to bridge the gap between the difficulties of learning ordinary binary search trees and their height-balanced variants in the typical data structures class. Instead of balancing the heights of the two children, we balance the number of their nodes. The concepts and programming techniques required for the node-balanced tree are much easier than the AVL tree or any other height-balanced alternatives. We also provide a very easy analysis showing that the height of a nodebalanced tree is bounded by c log n with c ≈ 1. Pedagogically, as simplicity is our main concern, our approach is worthwhile to be introduced to smooth student’s learning process. Moreover, our experimental results show that node-balanced binary search trees may also be considered for practical uses under some reasonable conditions.