On binary searching with non-uniform costs
SODA '01 Proceedings of the twelfth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
A strategy for searching with different access costs
Theoretical Computer Science
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Proposes an algorithm for finding a binary search tree that minimizes the worst-case cost when the access costs are non-uniform and depend on the last accessed key. For this kind of problem, which is commonly found when accessing data stored on magnetic or optical disks, we present an algorithm that finds an optimal search strategy with an expected running time of O(n/sup 2/log n), under some reasonable assumptions on the cost matrix. It is worth mentioning that the best previous algorithm for this problem runs in /spl Theta/(n/sup 3/) time.