Brian C. Dean Associate Professor Division of Computer Science School of Computing, Clemson University Office: McAdams Hall, Room 205 Phone: 864-656-5866 Mail: Brian C. Dean, School of Computing, Box 340974, Clemson SC 29634-0974 Email: bcdean@cs.clemson.edu

Exploring the Duality Between Skip Lists and Binary Search Trees

Although skip lists were introduced as an alternative to balanced binary search trees (BSTs), we show that the skip list can be interpreted as a type of randomly-balanced BST whose simplicity and elegance is arguably on par with that of today's most popular BST balancing mechanisms. In this paper, we provide a clear, concise description and analysis of the "BST" interpretation of the skip list, and compare it to similar randomized BST balancing mechanisms. In addition, we show that any rotation-based BST balancing mechanism can be implemented in a simple fashion using a skip list.

Available in pdf and postscript.