Self-Organizing Heuristics for Implicit Data Structures

Self-organizing heuristics are presented for data structures containing elements with different weights (access probabilities). The structures use just a constant number of locations in addition to those required for the values of the elements, and support average access times that are within a constant multiplicative factor of optimal. Data structures and corresponding heuristics with essentially optimal average unsuccessful search times are also given for the case in which there are probabilities of access associated with the intervals between consecutive element values.