Fat Heaps without Regular Counters

We introduce a variant of fat heaps that does not rely on regular counters, and still achieves the optimal worst-case bounds: O(1) for find-min, insert and decrease, and O(log n) for delete and delete-min. Compared to the original, our variant is simpler to explain, more efficient, and easier to implement. Experimental results suggest that our implementation is superior to structures, like run-relaxed heaps, that achieve the same worst-case bounds, and competitive to structures, like Fibonacci heaps, that achieve the same bounds in the amortized sense.