A splay tree is a type of balanced binary search tree.
Splay trees are simpler and easier to program.
Find operations can be faster or slower, depending on circumstances. Splay trees really excel in applications where a fraction of the items are the targets of most of the find operations, because they're designed to give especially fast access to items that have been accessed recently. Splay trees have become the most widely used data structure invented in the last 20 years, because they're the fastest type of balanced search tree for many applications. Suppose that X and Y are binary tree nodes, and A, B, and C are subtrees. A rotation transforms either of the configurations illustrated above to the other.