How are these two types of trees equivalent?
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Wikipedia has this to say on the subject.
2-3-4 trees are an isometry of red-black trees, meaning that they are equivalent data structures. In other words, for every 2-3-4 tree, there exists at least one red-black tree with data elements in the same order. Moreover, insertion and deletion operations on 2-3-4 trees that cause node expansions, splits and merges are equivalent to the color-flipping and rotations in red-black trees. Introductions to red-black trees usually introduce 2-3-4 trees first, because they are conceptually simpler.
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Chris Hannon
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You can convert 2-3-4 trees to red black tree by introducing a red node for 3 child one and 2 red nodes for 4 child one. The resulting tree will be binary tree. So in this way 2-3-4 tree is kind of equivalent to red black tree.
Ankush
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