Skip lift: a probabilistic alternative to red-black trees

  • Authors:
  • Prosenjit Bose;Karim Douïeb;Pat Morin

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada;School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada;School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

  • Venue:
  • IWOCA'10 Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Combinatorial algorithms
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We present the Skip lift, a randomized dictionary data structure inspired by the skip list [Pugh '90, Comm. of the ACM]. Similar to the skip list, the skip lift has the finger search property: Given a pointer to an arbitrary element f, searching for an element xtakes expected O(log δ) time where δ is the rank distance between the elements x and f. The skip lift uses nodes of O(1) worst-case size and it is one of the few efficient dictionary data structures that performs an O(1) worstcase number of structural changes during an update operation. Given a pointer to the element to be removed from the skip lift the deletion operation takes O(1) worst-case time.