The document summarizes the disjoint-set data structure and algorithms for implementing union-find operations on disjoint sets. Key points:
- Disjoint sets allow representing partitions of elements into disjoint groups and supporting operations to merge groups and find the group a element belongs to.
- Several implementations are described, including linked lists and rooted trees (forests).
- The weighted-union heuristic improves the naive linked list implementation from O(n^2) to O(m log n) time by merging shorter lists into longer ones.
- In forests, union-by-rank and path compression heuristics combine sets in nearly linear time by balancing tree heights and flattening paths during finds.