On Searching Sorted Lists: A Near-Optimal Lower Bound

We obtain improved lower bounds for a class of static and dynamic data structure problems that includes several problems of searching sorted lists as special cases. These lower bounds nearly match the upper bounds given by recent striking improvements in searching algorithms given by Fredman andWillard's fusion trees [9] and Andersson's search data structure [5]. Thus they show sharp limitations on the running time improvements obtainable using the unit-cost word-level RAM operations that those algorithms employ.