The limits of buffering
Elad Verbin, Qin Zhang · 2010
We study the dynamic membership (or dynamic dictionary) problem, which is one of the most fundamental problems in data structures. We study the problem in the external memory model with cell size b bits and cache size m bits. We prove that if the amortized cost of updates is at most 0.999 (or any other constant < 1), then the query cost must be (logb log n(n/m)), where n is the number of elements in the dictionary. In contrast, when the update time is allowed to be 1 + o(1), then a bit vector or hash table give query time O(1). Thus, this is a threshold phenomenon for data structures.