If you are not here for me, but more interested in computer science data structures… you probably want this… SKIPTREE DATASTRUCTURE

Everyone else…so why SkipTree? What in the world is a SkipTree? Where did I come up with such a weird term? Well to tell you the truth, it is an homage to a college professor of mine Who actually invented the SKIPLIST when i was at the university of Maryland.

I still remember him presenting it to students and faculty to a packed room on campus.  Bill Pugh is one of those smart professors who gets excited about something, which takes about six to eight months for the rest of the world to understand and get excited about. It is rare that anyone invents a new data structure in computer science, and to have been there when SKIPLISTS were invented, and to know that they would forever enter the textbooks of eager computer science dweebs from here on forward was actually quite an honor. (I took Bill Pugh for all my classes, so let no one say i tried to duck the man who shot for hatsizes as median scores for his exams…)

So that was the SKIPLIST, and where there are lists, there are trees! But a skiptree never materialized in those days. That was probably because a skiplist is actually already a treelike structure inthe sense that there are different heights to the nodes, and you traverse down through lists of nodes to get to your data, ( IMHO it should have been called a skiptree to begin with, but I digress). At least someone picked up on the skip-fu and ran with it. Behold the modern SKIPTREE DATASTRUCTURE!

And not a moment too soon. I thought I was going to be the only SkipTree around. But the domain is still mine, and so I will probably have to have one of the first presentations in the app be about SkipTree algorithms …of one kind or another.Besides, Skip and Tree are easy to remember. Its a thought meme of sorts, and It suits me to a tee…