Skip lists are data structures thla t use probabilistic balancing rather than strictly enforced balancing. As a result, the algorithms for insertion and deletion in skip lists are much simpler and significantly faster than equivalent algorithms for balanced trees. Binary trees can be used for representing abstract data types such as dictionaries and ordered lists. They work well when the elements are inserted in a random order. Some sequences of operations, such as inserting the elements in order, produce degenerate data structures that perform very poo.rly. If it were possible to randomly permute the list of items to be inserted, trees would work well with high probability for any input sequence. In most cases queries must be answered online, so randomly permuting the input is impractical. Balanced tree algorithms rearrange the tree as operations are performed to maintain certain balance conditions and assure good performance. Skip lists are a probabilistic alternative to balanced trees. Skip lists are balanced by consulting a random number generator. Although skip lists have bad worstcase performance, no input sequence consistently produces the worst-case performance (much like quicksort when the pivot element is chosen randomly). It is very unlikely a skip list data structure will be significantly unbalanced (e.g., for a dictionary of more than 250 elements, the chance that a search will take more than three-times the expeci.ed time is less than one in a million). Skip lists have balance properties similar to that of search trees built by random insertions, yet do not require insertions to be random. It is easier to balance a data structure probabilistitally than to explicitly maintain the balance. For many applications, skip lists are a more natural representation than trees, and they lead to simpler algorithms.
Skip lists are a randomized data structure introduced by Pugh for representing ordered sequences REF .
Skip lists: a probabilistic alternative to balanced trees
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Computer Science