List Accessing Problem is a well studied research problem in the context of linear search. Input to the list accessing problem is an unsorted linear list of distinct elements along with a sequence of requests, where each request is an access operation on an element of the list. A list accessing algorithm reorganizes the list while processing a request sequence on the list in order to minimize the access cost. Move-To-Front algorithm has been proved to be the best performing list accessing online algorithm till date in the literature. Characterization of the input request sequences corresponding to practical real life situations is a big challenge for the list accessing problem. As far as our knowledge is concerned, no characterization for the request sequences has been done in the literature till date for the list accessing problem. In this paper, we have characterized the request sequences for the list accessing problem based on several factors such as size of the list, size of the request sequence, ordering of elements and frequency of occurrence of elements in the request sequence. We have made a comprehensive study of MTF list accessing algorithm and obtained new theoretical results for our characterized special class of request sequences. Our characterization will open up a new direction of research for empirical analysis of list accessing algorithms for real life inputs.
Various list accessing algorithms have been proposed in the literature and their performances have been analyzed theoretically and experimentally. Move-To-Front (MTF) and Transpose (TRANS) are two well known primitive list accessing algorithms. MTF has been proved to be the best performing online algorithm till date in the literature for real life inputs and practical applications with locality of reference. It has been shown that when storage space is extremely limited and pointers for lists cannot be used, then array implementation of TRANS gives efficient reorganization. Use of MTF is extensive in the literature whereas, the use of TRANS is rare. As mentioned as an open problem in literature, direct bounds on the behavior and performance of various list accessing algorithms are needed to allow realistic comparisons. Since it has been shown that no single optimal permutation algorithm exists, it becomes necessary to characterize the circumstances that indicate the advantage in using a particular list accessing algorithm. Motivated by above challenging research issue, in this paper we have made an analytical study for evaluating the performance of TRANS list accessing algorithm using two special types of request sequences without locality of reference. We have compared the performance of TRANS with MTF and observed that TRANS outperforms MTF for these considered types of request sequences.
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