Priority Queue Introduction and Concept in DSA Python - Build from Scratch

Priority Queue Introduction and Concept

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are managing a hospital emergency room. Patients arrive with different levels of urgency. You want to treat the most urgent patients first. This is a perfect use case for a priority queue.

🎯 Goal: You will create a simple priority queue using a list of tuples where each tuple contains a patient's name and their priority level. Then, you will extract patients in order of their priority.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list called patients with given patient names and priority levels

Create a variable called highest_priority to track the highest priority found

Write a loop to find the patient with the highest priority

Print the patient with the highest priority

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Priority queues are used in hospitals, task scheduling, and anywhere urgent tasks must be handled first.

💼 Career

Understanding priority queues helps in roles like software development, system design, and operations where task prioritization is key.

1

Create the patient list

Create a list called patients with these exact entries: ("Alice", 2), ("Bob", 5), ("Charlie", 1), ("Diana", 4)

DSA Python

# Create the patients list with names and priority levels
# Your code here

Hint

Use a list of tuples where each tuple has a name and a number for priority.

2

Set up the highest priority variable

Create a variable called highest_priority and set it to 0 to start tracking the highest priority

DSA Python

patients = [("Alice", 2), ("Bob", 5), ("Charlie", 1), ("Diana", 4)]
# Create highest_priority variable and set it to 0
# Your code here

Hint

Start with 0 because priorities are positive numbers and we want to find the maximum.

3

Find the patient with the highest priority

Use a for loop with variables name and priority to iterate over patients. Inside the loop, update highest_priority if priority is greater than highest_priority. Also, create a variable called top_patient to store the name of the patient with the highest priority.

DSA Python

patients = [("Alice", 2), ("Bob", 5), ("Charlie", 1), ("Diana", 4)]
highest_priority = 0
# Use a for loop to find the patient with the highest priority
# Your code here

Hint

Compare each patient's priority to the current highest and update both the highest priority and the top patient name.

4

Print the patient with the highest priority

Write a print statement to display the text: "Patient with highest priority: " followed by the value of top_patient

DSA Python

patients = [("Alice", 2), ("Bob", 5), ("Charlie", 1), ("Diana", 4)]
highest_priority = 0
for name, priority in patients:
    if priority > highest_priority:
        highest_priority = priority
        top_patient = name
# Print the patient with the highest priority
# Your code here

Hint

Use string concatenation or f-string to combine the message and the patient name.