Unbalancing Binary Trees

Abstract

Assuming Zipf's Law to be accurate, we show that existing techniques for partially optimizing binary trees produce results that are approximately 10% worse than true optimal. We present a new approximate optimization technique that runs in O(n log n) time and produces trees approximately 1% worse than optimal. The running time is comparable to that of the Garsia-Wachs algorithm but the technique can be applied to the more useful case where the node being searched for is expected to be contained in the tree as opposed to outside of it.