Storing a sparse table

  • Authors:
  • Robert Endre Tarjan;Andrew Chi-Chih Yao

  • Affiliations:
  • Standford Univ., Stanford, CA;Standford Univ., Stanford, CA

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM
  • Year:
  • 1979

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Abstract

The problem of storing and searching large sparse tables is ubiquitous in computer science. The standard technique for storing such tables is hashing, but hashing has poor worst-case performance. We propose a good worst-case method for storing a static table of n entries, each an integer between 0 and N - 1. The method requires O(n) words of storage and allows O(logn N) access time. Although our method is a little complicated to use in practice, our analysis shows why a simpler algorithm used for compressing LR parsing tables works so well.