Skip lists are a data structure that can be used in place of balanced trees. Skip lists use probabilistic balancing rather than strictly enforced balancing and as a result the algorithms for insertion and deletion in skip lists are much simpler and significantly faster than equivalent algorithms for balanced trees.

We present a randomized strategy for maintaining balance in dynamically changing search trees that has optimal expected behavior. In particular, in the expected case a search or an update takes logarithmic time, with the update requiring fewer than two rotations. Moreover, the update time remains logarithmic, even if the cost of a rotation is taken to be proportional to the size of the rotated subtree. Finger searches and splits and joins can be performed in optimal expected time also. We show that these results continue to hold even if very little true randomness is available, i.e. if only a logarithmic number of truely random bits are available. Our approach generalizes naturally to weighted trees, where the expected time bounds for accesses and updates again match the worst case time bounds of the best deterministic methods. We also discuss ways of implementing our randomized strategy so that no explicit balance information is maintained. Our balancing strategy and our alg...

An adaptive computation maintains the relationship between its input and output as the input changes. Although various techniques for adaptive computing have been proposed, they remain limited in their scope of applicability. We propose a general mechanism for adaptive computing that enables one to make any purely-functional program adaptive. We show

ing with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax + 1 (212) 869-0481, or <permissions@acm.org>. 1 Specializing Shaders Brian Guenter, Todd B. Knoblock, Erik Ruf * Microsoft Research Abstract We have developed a system for interactive manipulation of shading parameters for three dimensional rendering. The system takes as input user-defined shaders, written in a subset of C, which are then specialized for interactive use. Since users typically experiment with different values of a single shader parameter while leaving the others constant, we can benefit by automatically generating a specialized shader that performs only those computations depending on the parameter being varied; all other values needed by the shader can be precomputed and cached. The specialized shaders are as much as 95 times faster than the origi...

A systematic approach is given for deriving incremental programs that exploit caching. The cache-and-prune method presented in the article consists of three stages: (I) the original program is extended to cache the results of all its intermediate subcomputations as well as the final result, (II) the extended program is incrementalized so that computation on a new input can use all intermediate results on an old input, %using existing techniques, and (III) unused results cached by the extended program and maintained by the incremental program are pruned away, leaving a pruned extended program that caches only useful intermediate results and a pruned incremental program that uses and maintains only the useful results. All three stages utilize static analyses and semantics-preserving transformations. Stages I and III are simple, clean, and fully automatable. The overall method has a kind of optimality with respect to the techniques used in Stage II. The method can be applied straightforwardly to provide a systematic approach to program improvement via caching.

We present a framework for applying memoization selectively. The framework provides programmer control over equality, space usage, and identification of precise dependences so that memoization can be applied according to the needs of an application. Two key properties of the framework are that it is efficient and yields programs whose performance can be analyzed using standard techniques. We describe the framework in the context of a functional language and an implementation as an SML library. The language is based on a modal type system and allows the programmer to express programs that reveal their true data dependences when executed. The SML implementation cannot support this modal type system statically, but instead employs run-time checks to ensure correct usage of primitives.

A systematic approach is given for deriving incremental programs from non-incremental programs written in a standard functional programming language. We exploit a number of program analysis and transformation techniques and domain-specific knowledge, centered around effective utilization of caching, in order to provide a degree of incrementality not otherwise achievable by a generic incremental evaluator. 1 Introduction Incremental programs take advantage of repeated computations on inputs that differ only slightly from one another, avoiding unnecessary duplication of common computations. Given a program f and a certain input change \Phi, a program f 0 that computes the value of f(x \Phi y) efficiently by making use of the value of f(x) is called an incremental version of f under \Phi. The parameter y can be regarded as a change ffix to the input x. Methods of incremental computation have widespread applications, e.g., loop optimizations in optimizing compilers [1, 24, 9, 10] and ...

Dynamic programming is an important algorithm design technique. It is used for solving problems whose solutions involve recursively solving subproblems that share subsubproblems. While a straightforward recursive program solves common subsubproblems repeatedly and often takes exponential time, a dynamic programming algorithm solves every subsubproblem just once, saves the result, reuses it when the subsubproblem is encountered again, and takes polynomial time. This paper describes a systematic method for transforming programs written as straightforward recursions into programs that use dynamic programming. The method extends the original program to cache all possibly computed values, incrementalizes the extended program with respect to an input increment to use and maintain all cached results, prunes out cached results that are not used in the incremental computation, and uses the resulting incremental program to form an optimized new program. Incrementalization statically exploits semantics of both control structures and data structures and maintains as invariants equalities characterizing cached results. The principle underlying incrementalization is general for achieving drastic program speedups. Compared with previous methods that perform memoization or tabulation, the method based on incrementalization is more powerful and systematic. It has been implemented and applied to numerous problems and succeeded on all of them. 1

Self-adjusting computation uses a combination of dynamic dependence graphs and memoization to efficiently update the output of a program as the input changes incrementally or dynamically over time. Related work showed various theoretical results, indicating that the approach can be effective for a reasonably broad range of applications. In this article, we describe algorithms and implementation techniques to realize self-adjusting computation and present an experimental evaluation of the proposed approach on a variety of applications, ranging from simple list primitives to more sophisticated computational geometry algorithms. The results of the experiments show that the approach is effective in practice, often offering orders of magnitude speedup from recomputing the output from scratch. We believe this is the first experimental evidence that incremental computation of any type is effective in practice for a reasonably broad set of applications.

From the algorithmic perspective, we describe novel data structures for tracking the dependences ina computation and a change-propagation algorithm for adjusting computations to changes. We show that the overhead of our dependence tracking techniques is O(1). To determine the effectiveness of changepropagation, we present an analysis technique, called trace stability, and apply it to a number of applications.