Skip-Splay: Toward Achieving the Unified Bound in the BST Model

We present skip-splay, the first binary search tree algorithm known to have a running time that nearly achieves the unified bound. Skip-splay trees require only O (m lg lg n + UB (*** )) time to execute a query sequence *** = *** 1 ... *** m . The skip-splay algorithm is simple and similar to the splay algorithm.