Pattern Avoidance in k-ary Heaps

In this paper, we consider pattern avoidance in k-ary heaps, where the permutation associated with the heap is found by recording the nodes as they are encountered in a breadth-first search. We enumerate heaps that avoid patterns of length 3 and collections of patterns of length 3, first with binary heaps and then more generally with k-ary heaps

Zipf's Law Leads to Heaps' Law: Analyzing Their Relation in Finite-Size Systems

Background: Zipf's law and Heaps' law are observed in disparate complex systems. Of particular interests, these two laws often appear together. Many theoretical models and analyses are performed to understand their co-occurrence in real systems, but it still lacks a clear picture about their relation. Methodology/Principal Findings: We show that the Heaps' law can be considered as a derivative phenomenon if the system obeys the Zipf's law. Furthermore, we refine the known approximate solution of the Heaps' exponent provided the Zipf's exponent. We show that the approximate solution is indeed an asymptotic solution for infinite systems, while in the finite-size system the Heaps' exponent is sensitive to the system size. Extensive empirical analysis on tens of disparate systems demonstrates that our refined results can better capture the relation between the Zipf's and Heaps' exponents. Conclusions/Significance: The present analysis provides a clear picture about the relation between the Zipf's law and Heaps' law without the help of any specific stochastic model, namely the Heaps' law is indeed a derivative phenomenon from Zipf's law. The presented numerical method gives considerably better estimation of the Heaps' exponent given the Zipf's exponent and the system size. Our analysis provides some insights and implications of real complex systems, for example, one can naturally obtained a better explanation of the accelerated growth of scale-free networks.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, 1 Tabl

Hollow Heaps

We introduce the hollow heap, a very simple data structure with the same amortized efficiency as the classical Fibonacci heap. All heap operations except delete and delete-min take $O(1)$ time, worst case as well as amortized; delete and delete-min take $O(\log n)$ amortized time on a heap of $n$ items. Hollow heaps are by far the simplest structure to achieve this. Hollow heaps combine two novel ideas: the use of lazy deletion and re-insertion to do decrease-key operations, and the use of a dag (directed acyclic graph) instead of a tree or set of trees to represent a heap. Lazy deletion produces hollow nodes (nodes without items), giving the data structure its name.Comment: 27 pages, 7 figures, preliminary version appeared in ICALP 201

Quantum heaps, cops and heapy categories

A heap is a structure with a ternary operation which is intuitively a group with forgotten unit element. Quantum heaps are associative algebras with a ternary cooperation which are to the Hopf algebras what heaps are to groups, and, in particular, the category of copointed quantum heaps is isomorphic to the category of Hopf algebras. There is an intermediate structure of a cop in monoidal category which is in the case of vector spaces to a quantum heap about what is a coalgebra to a Hopf algebra. The representations of Hopf algebras make a rigid monoidal category. Similarly the representations of quantum heaps make a kind of category with ternary products, which we call a heapy category.Comment: 10 pages, an adaptation of an old 2001 preprin

A new heap game

Given $k\ge 3$ heaps of tokens. The moves of the 2-player game introduced here are to either take a positive number of tokens from at most $k-1$ heaps, or to remove the {\sl same} positive number of tokens from all the $k$ heaps. We analyse this extension of Wythoff's game and provide a polynomial-time strategy for it.Comment: To appear in Computer Games 199

On rank functions for heaps

Motivated by work of Stembridge, we study rank functions for Viennot's heaps of pieces. We produce a simple and sufficient criterion for a heap to be a ranked poset and apply the results to the heaps arising from fully commutative words in Coxeter groups.Comment: 18 pages AMSTeX, 3 figure