One root-to-leaf path, drawn on the memory it touches

One root-to-leaf path, drawn on the memory it touches

The 63 nodes of a complete tree of height 6, laid out three ways, with the 6 nodes of one search path filled in. Alternating shades are blocks of B = 8. The path is the same path in all three rows and the comparisons are the same 6; what changes is how many blocks it lands in — 2 under sorted array (binary search), 4 under level order.

Drawn at 700 × 344, wide on the page. Everything above is what layout-map returns with no arguments; the caption is the generator's own, computed from the numbers in the drawing rather than written beside it.

3 essays call layout-map. The drawing above is what it returns with no arguments at all; every call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the one its essay argues about — which is what optcheck and figfill exist to catch.