Compressing Sparse Tables using a Genetic Algorithm

Sparse tables have many uses. Sparse matrices, for instance, are abundant in linear algebra problems ([VDV 88]). Finite state machine representations, such as parsing DFA's, are often represented as 2-dimensional tables which are mostly empty ([DEN 84]). In [AOE 82], an efficient implementation of trie-trees is described that represents nodes as arrays of constant size. Thus a trie tree can be represented as a 2-dimensional table, associating a node number with an array. The resulting table is sparse. In [DRI 93a], a method lookup technique for dynamically typed objectoriented languages is presented in which the association of an object class and message selector to a method is performed through a sparse table.