Should Static Search Trees Ever Be Unbalanced?
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper we study the question of whether or not a static search tree should ever be unbalanced. We present several methods to restructure an unbalanced k-ary search tree $T$ into a new tree $R$ that preserves many of the properties of $T$ while having a height of $\log_k n +1$ which is one unit off of the optimal height. More specifically, we show that it is possible to ensure that the depth of the elements in $R$ is no more than their depth in $T$ plus at most $\log_k \log_k n +2$. At the same time it is possible to guarantee that the average access time $P(R)$ in tree $R$ is no more than the average access time $P(T)$ in tree $T$ plus $O(\log_k P(T))$. This suggests that for most applications, a balanced tree is always a better option than an unbalanced one since the balanced tree has similar average access time and much better worst case access time.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it