What does a radix trie save compared to a standard trie?
A standard trie stores one character per node; a radix trie collapses single-child chains into multi-character edges. For 'car', 'card', 'care', 'cart', a standard trie uses 7 nodes; a radix trie uses 2 ('car' + 'e'/'t'/'d'). Savings: 60-70% of memory for long prefixes.
Answered in
Tries: Why Autocomplete Doesn't Scan Every WordA trie finds all words with a prefix in O(p) time, independent of dictionary size. Radix compression and top-k heaps make autocomplete instant.
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