An Open Ended Tree

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open ended tree data structure that improves upon traditional open ended lists in Prolog by achieving logarithmic time complexity for updates and access, enhancing efficiency in representing changing values.

Contribution

It presents a novel variant of open ended lists called open ended trees, reducing update and access time complexity from linear to logarithmic.

Findings

Open ended trees have logarithmic access and update times.

The structure improves efficiency in Prolog applications.

Experimental results demonstrate performance gains.

Abstract

An open ended list is a well known data structure in Prolog programs. It is frequently used to represent a value changing over time, while this value is referred to from several places in the data structure of the application. A weak point in this technique is that the time complexity is linear in the number of updates to the value represented by the open ended list. In this programming pearl we present a variant of the open ended list, namely an open ended tree, with an update and access time complexity logarithmic in the number of updates to the value.