Simple 2^f-Color Choice Dictionaries

A c-color choice dictionary of size n in N is a fundamental data structure in the development of space-efficient algorithms that stores the colors of n elements and that supports operations to get and change the color of an element as well as an operation choice that returns an arbitrary element of that color. For an integer f>0 and a constant c=2^f, we present a word-RAM algorithm for a c-color choice dictionary of size n that supports all operations above in constant time and uses only nf+1 bits, which is optimal if all operations have to run in o(n/w) time where w is the word size. In addition, we extend our choice dictionary by an operation union without using more space