Analysis of Skiplists
Explore the probabilistic foundations and performance analysis of skiplists. Understand how expected height, size, and search path length determine the efficiency of search operations in skiplists. This lesson uses basic probability and coin toss experiments to explain why skiplists offer logarithmic search times and linear space complexity.
We'll cover the following...
We'll cover the following...
In this lesson, we analyze the expected height, size, and length of the search path in a skiplist. This section requires a background in basic probability. Several proofs are based on the following basic observation about coin tosses.
Lemma 1: Let be the number of times a fair coin is tossed up to and including the first time the coin comes up heads. Then ...