AVL is an acronym that stands for "Adelson-Velskii and Landis." It refers to a self-balancing binary search tree data structure named after the Soviet computer scientists Georgy Adelson-Velskii and Evgenii Landis, who introduced it in 1962. An AVL tree maintains its balanced condition by performing rotations when necessary to ensure that the height difference between the left and right subtrees of any node is at most one.
The AVL tree is characterized by its ability to provide efficient operations for searching, inserting, and deleting elements. Its balancing feature guarantees that these operations are performed in logarithmic time complexity, making AVL trees suitable for applications that often require frequent modifications or search operations.
In an AVL tree, each node usually contains a key-value pair, where the keys are unique and sorted in a specific order. The tree is organized in such a way that for any given node, the values in its left subtree are smaller than its key value, and the values in its right subtree are larger. This property allows for rapidly locating elements within the tree.
The balancing mechanism of AVL trees is triggered by performing specific rotations, such as the left and right rotations, to maintain the height balance. These rotations efficiently adjust the structure of the tree to avoid any significant imbalance that would lead to performance degradation.
Overall, AVL trees are widely used in computer science and provide an efficient and reliable solution for various applications that require sorted data structures and fast search, insert, and delete operations.
