arXiv subjects

Caleb C. Levy

Publications and source records attributed to Caleb C. Levy.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

A Foundation for Proving Splay is Dynamically Optimal

Consider the task of performing a sequence of searches in a binary search tree. After each search, we allow an algorithm to arbitrarily restructure the tree. The cost of executing the task is the sum of the time spent searching and the time spent optimizing the searches with restructuring operations. Sleator and Tarjan introduced this notion in 1985, along with an algorithm and a conjecture. The algorithm, Splay, is an elegant procedure for performing adjustments that move searched items to the top of the tree. The conjecture, called dynamic optimality, is that the cost of splaying is always within a constant factor of the optimal algorithm for performing searches. We lay a foundation for proving the dynamic optimality conjecture. Central to our method is approximate monotonicity. Approximately monotone algorithms are those whose cost does not increase by more than a fixed multiple after removing searches from the sequence. As we shall see, Splay is dynamically optimal if and only if it is approximately monotone. This result extends to a weaker form of approximate monotonicity as well as insertion, deletion, and related algorithms. We prove that a lower bound on optimal execution cost is approximately monotone and outline how to adapt this proof from the lower bound to Splay, and how to overcome the remaining barriers to establishing dynamic optimality.

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arXiv2022

Zip Trees

We introduce the zip tree, a form of randomized binary search tree that integrates previous ideas into one practical, performant, and pleasant-to-implement package. A zip tree is a binary search tree in which each node has a numeric rank and the tree is (max)-heap-ordered with respect to ranks, with rank ties broken in favor of smaller keys. Zip trees are essentially treaps (Seidel and Aragon 1996), except that ranks are drawn from a geometric distribution instead of a uniform distribution, and we allow rank ties. These changes enable us to use fewer random bits per node. We perform insertions and deletions by unmerging and merging paths ("unzipping" and "zipping") rather than by doing rotations, which avoids some pointer changes and improves efficiency. The methods of zipping and unzipping take inspiration from previous top-down approaches to insertion and deletion (Stephenson 1980; Martínez and Roura 1998; Sprugnoli 1980). From a theoretical standpoint, this work provides two main results. First, zip trees require only $O(\log \log n)$ bits (with high probability) to represent the largest rank in an $n$-node binary search tree; previous data structures require $O(\log n)$ bits for the largest rank. Second, zip trees are naturally isomorphic to skip lists (Pugh 1990), and simplify the mapping of (Dean and Jones 2007) between skip lists and binary search trees.

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arXiv2019

Splaying Preorders and Postorders

Let $T$ be a binary search tree. We prove two results about the behavior of the Splay algorithm (Sleator and Tarjan 1985). Our first result is that inserting keys into an empty binary search tree via splaying in the order of either $T$'s preorder or $T$'s postorder takes linear time. Our proof uses the fact that preorders and postorders are pattern-avoiding: i.e. they contain no subsequences that are order-isomorphic to $(2,3,1)$ and $(3,1,2)$, respectively. Pattern-avoidance implies certain constraints on the manner in which items are inserted. We exploit this structure with a simple potential function that counts inserted nodes lying on access paths to uninserted nodes. Our methods can likely be extended to permutations that avoid more general patterns. Second, if $T'$ is any other binary search tree with the same keys as $T$ and $T$ is weight-balanced (Nievergelt and Reingold 1973), then splaying $T$'s preorder sequence or $T$'s postorder sequence starting from $T'$ takes linear time. To prove this, we demonstrate that preorders and postorders of balanced search trees do not contain many large "jumps" in symmetric order, and exploit this fact by using the dynamic finger theorem (Cole et al. 2000). Both of our results provide further evidence in favor of the elusive "dynamic optimality conjecture."

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