We present a new finger search tree with O(1) worst-case update time and O(log log d) expected search time with high probability in the Random Access Machine (RAM) model of computation for a large class of input distributions. The parameter d represents the number of elements (distance) between the search element and an element pointed to by a finger, in a finger search tree that stores n elements. For the need of the analysis we model the updates by a “balls and bins” combinatorial game that is interesting in its own right as it involves insertions and deletions of balls according to an unknown distribution.
Alexis C. Kaporis, Christos Makris, Spyros Sioutas