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

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.

Self-adjusting computation enables writing programs that can automatically and efficiently respond to changes to their data (e.g., inputs). The idea behind the approach is to store all data that can change over time in modifiable references and to let computations construct traces that can drive change propagation. After changes have occurred, change propagation updates the result of the computation by re-evaluating only those expressions that depend on the changed data. Previous approaches to selfadjusting computation require that modifiable references be written at most once during execution—this makes the model applicable only in a purely functional setting. In this paper, we present techniques for imperative self-adjusting computation where modifiable references can be written multiple times. We define a language SAIL (Self-Adjusting Imperative Language) and prove consistency, i.e., that change propagation and from-scratch execution are observationally equivalent. Since SAIL programs are imperative, they can create cyclic data structures. To prove equivalence in the presence of cycles in the store, we formulate and use an untyped, step-indexed logical relation, where step indices are used to ensure well-foundedness. We show that SAIL accepts an asymptotically efficient implementation by presenting algorithms and data structures for its implementation. When the number of operations (reads and writes) per modifiable is bounded by a constant, we show that change propagation becomes as efficient as in the non-imperative case. The general case incurs a slowdown that is logarithmic in the maximum number of such operations. We describe a prototype implementation of SAIL as a Standard ML library. 1

Change propagation is a technique for automatically adjusting the output of an algorithm to changes in the input. The idea behind change propagation is to track the dependences between data and function calls, so that, when the input changes, functions affected by that change can be re-executed to update the computation and the output. Change propagation makes it possible for a compiler to dynamize static algorithms. The practical effectiveness of change propagation, however, is not known. In particular, the cost of dependence tracking and change propagation may seem significant. The contributions of the paper are twofold. First, we present some experimental evidence that change propagation performs well when compared to direct implementations of dynamic algorithms. We implement change propagation on tree-contraction as a solution to the dynamic trees problem and present an experimental evaluation of the approach. As a second contribution, we present a library for dynamic-trees that support a general interface and present an experimental evaluation by considering a broad set of applications. The dynamic-trees library relies on change propagation to handle edge insertions/deletions. The applications that we consider include path queries, subtree queries, leastcommon-ancestor queries, maintenance of centers and medians of trees, nearest-marked-vertex queries, semidynamic minimum spanning trees, and the max-flow algorithm of Sleator and Tarjan.

We give the first correct O(n log n) algorithm for finding a maximum st-flow in a directed planar graph. After a preprocessing step that consists in finding single-source shortest-path distances in the dual, the algorithm consists of repeatedly saturating the leftmost residual s-to-t path.

Abstract. Define a static algorithm as an algorithm that computes some combinatorial property of its input consisting of static, i.e., non-moving, objects. In this paper, we describe a technique for syntactically transforming static algorithms into kinetic algorithms, which compute properties of moving objects. The technique o«ers capabilities for composing kinetic algorithms, for integrating dynamic and kinetic changes, and for ensuring robustness even with fixed-precision floating-point arithmetic. To evaluate the e«ectiveness of the approach, we implement a library for performing the transformation, transform a number of algorithms, and give an experimental evaluation. The results show that the technique performs well in practice. 1

We present a strongly history independent (SHI) hash table that supports search in O(1) worst-case time, and insert and delete in O(1) expected time using O(n) data space. This matches the bounds for dynamic perfect hashing, and improves on the best previous results by Naor and Teague on history independent hashing, which were either weakly history independent, or only supported insertion and search (no delete) each in O(1) expected time. The results can be used to construct many other SHI data structures. We show straightforward constructions for SHI ordered dictionaries: for n keys from {1,..., n k} searches take O(log log n) worst-case time and updates (insertions and deletions) O(log log n) expected time, and for keys in the comparison model searches take O(log n) worst-case time and updates O(log n) expected time. We also describe a SHI data structure for the order-maintenance problem. It supports comparisons in O(1) worst-case time, and updates in O(1) expected time. All structures use O(n) data space. 1

Abstract. This paper presents a semantics of self-adjusting computation and proves that the semantics is correct and consistent. The semantics integrates change propagation with the classic idea of memoization to enable reuse of computations under mutation to memory. During evaluation, reuse of a computation via memoization triggers a change propagation that adjusts the reused computation to reflect the mutated memory. Since the semantics combines memoization and change-propagation, it involves both non-determinism and mutation. Our consistency theorem states that the non-determinism is not harmful: any two evaluations of the same program starting at the same state yield the same result. Our correctness theorem states that mutation is not harmful: self-adjusting programs are consistent with purely functional programming. We formalized the semantics and its meta-theory in the LF logical framework and machine-checked the proofs in Twelf. 1

We observe that the classical maximum flow problem in any directed planar graph G can be reformulated as a parametric shortest path problem in the oriented dual graph G ∗. This reformulation immediately suggests an algorithm to compute maximum flows, which runs in O(n log n) time. As we continuously increase the parameter, each change in the shortest path tree can be effected in O(log n) time using standard dynamic tree data structures, and the special structure of the parametrization implies that each directed edge enters the evolving shortest path tree at most once. The resulting maximum-flow algorithm is identical to the recent algorithm of Borradaile and Klein [J. ACM 2009], but our new formulation allows a simpler presentation and analysis. On the other hand, we demonstrate that for a similarly structured parametric shortest path problem on the torus, the shortest path tree can change Ω(n²) times in the worst case, suggesting that a different method may be required to efficiently compute maximum flows in higher-genus graphs.