Emerging behavior as binary search trees are symmetrically updated
✍ Scribed by Stephen Taylor; Marianne Durand
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2003
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 267 KB
- Volume
- 297
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0304-3975
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
When repeated updates are made to a binary search tree, the expected search cost tends to improve, as observed by Knott. For the case in which the updates use an asymmetric deletion algorithm, the Knott e ect is swamped by the behavior discovered by Eppinger. The Knott e ect applies also to updates using symmetric deletion algorithms, and it remains unexplained, along with several other trends in the tree distribution. It is believed that updates using symmetric deletion do not cause search cost to deteriorate, but the evidence is all experimental. The contribution of this paper is to model separately several di erent trends which may contribute to or detract from the Knott e ect, including a previously unreported centripetal tendency.