Abstract

It was suggested in [8] to avoid redundant queries in the skip list search algorithm by marking those elements whose key has already been checked by the search algorithm. We present here a precise analysis of the total search cost (expectation and variance), where the cost of the search is measured in terms of the number of keyto -key comparison.These results are then compared with the corresponding values of the standard search algorithm. 1 Introduction Skip lists have recently been introduced as a type of list-based data structure that may substitute search trees [9]. A set of n elements is stored in a collection of sorted linear linked lists in the following manner: all elements are stored in increasing order in a linked list called level 1 and, recursively, each element which appears in the linked list level i is included with independent probability q (0 ! q ! 1) in the linked list level i + 1. The level of an element x is the number of linked lists it belongs to. For each elemen...

Citations