The ubiquitous digital tree

• Authors: Philippe Flajolet
• Venue: STACS'06 Proceedings of the 23rd Annual conference on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science
• Year: 2006

The digital tree also known as trie made its first appearance as a general-purpose data structure in the late 1950's. Its principle is a recursive partitioning based on successive bits or digits of data items. Under various guises, it has then surfaced in the management of very large data bases, in the design of efficient communication protocols, in quantitative data mining, in the leader election problem of distributed computing, in data compression, as well as in some corners of computational geometry. The algorithms are invariably very simple, easy to implement, and in a number of cases surprisingly efficient. The corresponding quantitative analyses pose challenging mathematical problems and have triggered a flurry of research works. Generating functions and symbolic methods, singularity analysis, the saddle-point method, transfer operators of dynamical systems theory, and the Mellin transform have all been found to have a bearing on the probabilistic behaviour of trie algorithms. We offer here a perspective on the rich algorithmic, analytic, and probabilistic aspects of tries, culminating with a connection between a sorting problem and the Riemann hypothesis.