Skip Lists are a data structure that can be used in place of balanced trees. Skip lists use probabilistic balancing rather than strictly enforcing balancing and as a result the algorithms for insertion and deletion in skip lists are much simpler and significantly faster than equivalent algorithms for balanced trees. Skip lists have first been published by William Pugh.

This interactive Java applet allows the user to experiment on the behaviour of skip lists.
The functions offered should be self explaining.

Have fun using this applet. (Sourcecode here)

In the April/May 1998 issue of the US Magazine Java Pro  you find an article I wrote about my Java implementation.

This article is translated to Serbo-Croatian language by Jovana Milutinovich from Webhostinggeeks.com.

        The author: Thomas Wenger, University of Berne, Switzerland

• Insert 10 Random nodes: inserts 10 nodes into the list with randomly generated key and value
• Reset: deletes all nodes in list

• The key- and value-textfields are used to show and read data of a node
• Insert: inserts a new node into the list using the key and value entered in textfields
• Search: searches the node in the list with the key entered in key-textfield
• Delete: deletes the node with the key entered in key-textfield out of the list

• If you select a node in the display, its key and value is automatically shown in the textfields

This page has been visited  times since Nov-20-1997.