Pairing heaps with costless meld

Abstract

Improving the structure and analysis in [1], we give a variation of pairing heaps that has amortized zero cost per meld (compared to an O(lg lg n) in [1]) and the same amortized bounds for other operations. More precisely, the new pairing heap requires: no cost per meld, O(1) per find-min and insert, O(lg n) per delete-min, and O(lg lg n) per decrease-key, where n is the size of the priority queue at the time the operation is performed. These bounds are the best known for any self-adjusting heap, and match the lower bound established by Fredman for a family of such priority queues. Moreover, our structure is even simpler than that in [1]. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.