3,656 research outputs found
Smooth heaps and a dual view of self-adjusting data structures
We present a new connection between self-adjusting binary search trees (BSTs)
and heaps, two fundamental, extensively studied, and practically relevant
families of data structures. Roughly speaking, we map an arbitrary heap
algorithm within a natural model, to a corresponding BST algorithm with the
same cost on a dual sequence of operations (i.e. the same sequence with the
roles of time and key-space switched). This is the first general transformation
between the two families of data structures.
There is a rich theory of dynamic optimality for BSTs (i.e. the theory of
competitiveness between BST algorithms). The lack of an analogous theory for
heaps has been noted in the literature. Through our connection, we transfer all
instance-specific lower bounds known for BSTs to a general model of heaps,
initiating a theory of dynamic optimality for heaps.
On the algorithmic side, we obtain a new, simple and efficient heap
algorithm, which we call the smooth heap. We show the smooth heap to be the
heap-counterpart of Greedy, the BST algorithm with the strongest proven and
conjectured properties from the literature, widely believed to be
instance-optimal. Assuming the optimality of Greedy, the smooth heap is also
optimal within our model of heap algorithms. As corollaries of results known
for Greedy, we obtain instance-specific upper bounds for the smooth heap, with
applications in adaptive sorting.
Intriguingly, the smooth heap, although derived from a non-practical BST
algorithm, is simple and easy to implement (e.g. it stores no auxiliary data
besides the keys and tree pointers). It can be seen as a variation on the
popular pairing heap data structure, extending it with a "power-of-two-choices"
type of heuristic.Comment: Presented at STOC 2018, light revision, additional figure
Fast Dynamic Pointer Following via Link-Cut Trees
In this paper, we study the problem of fast dynamic pointer following: given
a directed graph where each vertex has outdegree , efficiently support
the operations of i) changing the outgoing edge of any vertex, and ii) find the
vertex vertices `after' a given vertex. We exhibit a solution to this
problem based on link-cut trees that requires time per operation,
and prove that this is optimal in the cell-probe complexity model.Comment: 7 page
Top-Down Skiplists
We describe todolists (top-down skiplists), a variant of skiplists (Pugh
1990) that can execute searches using at most
binary comparisons per search and that have amortized update time
. A variant of todolists, called working-todolists,
can execute a search for any element using binary comparisons and have amortized search time
. Here, is the "working-set number" of
. No previous data structure is known to achieve a bound better than
comparisons. We show through experiments that, if implemented
carefully, todolists are comparable to other common dictionary implementations
in terms of insertion times and outperform them in terms of search times.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure
New Algorithms and Lower Bounds for Sequential-Access Data Compression
This thesis concerns sequential-access data compression, i.e., by algorithms
that read the input one or more times from beginning to end. In one chapter we
consider adaptive prefix coding, for which we must read the input character by
character, outputting each character's self-delimiting codeword before reading
the next one. We show how to encode and decode each character in constant
worst-case time while producing an encoding whose length is worst-case optimal.
In another chapter we consider one-pass compression with memory bounded in
terms of the alphabet size and context length, and prove a nearly tight
tradeoff between the amount of memory we can use and the quality of the
compression we can achieve. In a third chapter we consider compression in the
read/write streams model, which allows us passes and memory both
polylogarithmic in the size of the input. We first show how to achieve
universal compression using only one pass over one stream. We then show that
one stream is not sufficient for achieving good grammar-based compression.
Finally, we show that two streams are necessary and sufficient for achieving
entropy-only bounds.Comment: draft of PhD thesi
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