Abstract
We consider self-organizing data structures when the number of data accesses is unknown. We show that certain general rearrangement rules can be modified to reduce significantly the number of data moves, without affecting the asymptotic cost of a data access. As a special case, explicit formulae are given for the expected cost of a data access and the expected number of data moves for the modified move-to-front rules for linear lists and binary trees. Since a data move usually costs at least as much as a data access, the modified rule eventually leads to a savings in total cost (the sum of data accesses and moves).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bentley, J. L., and C. C. McGeoch, Amortized Analyses of Self-Organizing Sequential Search Heuristics,Comm. ACM,28 (1985), 404–411.
Bitner, J. R., Heuristics that Dynamically Organize Data Structures,SIAM J. Comput.,8 (1979), 82–110.
Gonnet, G. H., J. I. Munro, and H. Suwanda, Exegesis of Self-Organizing Linear Search,SIAM J. Comput.,10 (1981), 613–637.
Greene, D. H., and D. E. Knuth,Mathematics for the Analysis of Algorithms, second edition, Birkhauser, Boston, 1982.
Hendricks, W. J., An Account of Self-Organizing Systems,SIAM J. Comput.,5 (1976), 715–723.
Knuth, D. E.,The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 3, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1973.
Lam, K., M. Leung, and M. Siu, Self-organizing Files with Dependent Acess,J. Appl. Probab.,21 (1984), 343–359.
Madsen, R. W., and D. L. Isaacson,Markov Chains and Applications, Wiley, New York, 1976.
McCabe, J., On Serial Files with Relocatable Records,Operations Res.,12 (1965), 609–618.
Rivest, R., On Self-Organizing Sequential Search Heuristics,Comm. ACM,19 (1976), 63–67.
Sleator, D. D., and R. E. Tarjan, Amortized Efficiency of List Update and Paging Rules,Comm. ACM,28 (1985), 202–208.
Sleator, D. D., and R. E. Tarjan, Self-Adjusting Binary Search Trees,J. ACM,32 (1985), 652–686.
Tenenbaum, A. M., Simulations of Dynamic Sequential Search Algorithms,Comm. ACM,21 (1978), 790–791.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
Communicated by Jon Bentley.
This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, Grant Number MCS 81-17364
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kapoor, S., Reingold, E.M. Stochastic rearrangement rules for self-organizing data structures. Algorithmica 6, 278–291 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01759046
Received:
Revised:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01759046