Path balance heuristic for self-adjusting binary search trees

Abstract

In (A. Subramanian, An Explanation of Splaying, Proceedings of the l4th Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, LNCS Springer Verlag 880 354-365), D. Sleator suggested the following heuristic for self adjusting binary search trees: Every time an access is made, restructure the entire path from the root of the search tree to the accessed node into a balanced binary search tree on those nodes, and place all other subtrees rooted at the children of the nodes in the access path in their proper positions. We show that the method has an O(log n log log n/log log log n) amortized complexity.