In this article we study the amortized efficiency of the “move-to-front” and similar rules for dynamically maintaining a linear list. Under the assumption that accessing the ith element from the front of the list takes 0(i) time, we show that move-to-front is within a consfant factor of optimum among a wide class of list maintenance rules. Other natural heuristics, such as the transpose and fre...

Sequential lists are a frequently used data structure for implementing dictionaries. Recently, self-organizing sequential lists have been proposed for \engines" in eecient data compression algorithms. In this paper, we investigate the problem of list accessing from the perspective of competitive analysis. We establish a connection between random-ized list accessing algorithms and Markov chains,...