Skip lift: A probabilistic alternative to red-black trees

Abstract

We present the Skip lift, a randomized dictionary data structure inspired by the skip list [Pugh '90, Comm. of the ACM]. Similar to the skip list, the skip lift has the finger search property: Given a pointer to an arbitrary element f, searching for an element x takes expected O(logδ) time where δ is the rank distance between the elements x and f. The skip lift uses nodes of O(1) worst-case size and it is one of the few efficient dictionary data structures that performs an O(1) worst-case number of structural changes during an update operation. Given a pointer to the element to be removed from the skip lift the deletion operation takes O(1) worst-case time. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.