Sampling to provide or to bound: With applications to fully dynamic graph algorithms

In dynamic graph algorithms the following provide-or-bound problem has to be solved quickly: Given a set S containing a subset R and a way of generating random elements from S testing for membership in R, either (i) provide an element of R or (ii) give a (small) upper bound on the size of R that holds with high probability. We give an optimal algorithm for this problem. This algorithm improves the time per operation for various dyamic graph algorithms by a factor of O(log n). For example, it improves the time per update for fully dynamic connectivity from O(log 3 n) to O(log 2 n).