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...

Some new classes of balanced trees, defined by very simple balance criteria, are introduced. Those trees can be maintained by partial rebuilding at lower update cost than previously used weight-balanced trees. The used balance criteria also allow us to maintain a balanced tree without any balance information stored in the nodes.

We show that, in order to achieve efficient maintenance of a balanced binary search tree, no shape restriction other than a logarithmic height is required. The obtained class of trees, general balanced trees, may be maintained at a logarithmic amortized cost with no balance information stored in the nodes. Thus, in the case when amortized bounds are sufficient, there is no need for sophisticated balance criteria. The maintenance algorithms use partial rebuilding. This is important for certain applications and has previously been used with weight-balanced trees. We show that the amortized cost incurred by general balanced trees is lower than what has been shown for weight-balanced trees. � 1999 Academic Press 1.