English

A 3.3904-Competitive Online Algorithm for List Update with Uniform Costs

Data Structures and Algorithms 2025-08-11 v3

Abstract

We consider the List Update problem where the cost of each swap is assumed to be 1. This is in contrast to the ``standard'' model, in which an algorithm is allowed to swap the requested item with previous items for free. We construct an online algorithm Full-Or-Partial-Move (FPM), whose competitive ratio is at most 3.39043.3904, improving over the previous best known bound of 44.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.17264,
  title  = {A 3.3904-Competitive Online Algorithm for List Update with Uniform Costs},
  author = {Mateusz Basiak and Marcin Bienkowski and Martin Böhm and Marek Chrobak and Łukasz Jeż and Jiří Sgall and Agnieszka Tatarczuk},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.17264},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:29:57.535Z