Skip list Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Skip list - Essay Example It was developed by Professor William Pugh who saw a skip list as an alternative to AVL trees, splay trees, and self-adjusting trees. The idea of skip lists was to make a better sorted linked list. It was easier to perform deletion and insertion operations but hard to locate items. This is because a person would only move along the list using an item at a time. Professor William Pugh saw that if it was possible to skip over a number of items each at a time, then the problem of locating items would be solved. He therefore thought of a hierarchy of linked lists where each stacked on top of one another. According to Anastasio, there are three list data structures that use similar skipping strategy as that of the skip list. One of the list data structures allows any node to skip in a traversal manner. The second list data structures allow any 4th node to skip while the other one allows every 8th node to skip. All the three list data structures consist of a header note that do not have si milar number of forward references. Although each node has a reference to the following node, others have additional references to the next nodes on the same list. However, the find operation algorithm used by the three list data structure is similarly used by the real skip lists (Anastasio). Skip list is an interesting data structure for efficient realization of ordered map ADT. Skip list makes it possible for people to make random choices when arranging entries. During the arrangement the update and search time is usually O (log n) on average. n in this case, is the amount of entries fed in the dictionary. It is important to note that, there is no dependence of the time complexity used, on the keys’ probability distribution in the input. Instead, the time complexity depends on the utilization of a random number generator during implementation of insertion operation. This assists a person in deciding where to locate a new entry. However, there is an