Treffer: The cell probe complexity of succinct data structures

We consider time-space tradeoffs for static data structure problems in the cell probe model with word size 1 (the bit probe model). In this model, the goal is to represent n-bit data with s = n + r bits such that queries (of a certain type) about the data can be answered by reading at most t bits of the representation. Ideally, we would like to keep both s and t small, but there are tradeoffs between the values of s and t that limit the possibilities of keeping both parameters small. In this paper, we consider the case of succinct representations, where s = n + r for some redundancy r << n. For a Boolean version of the problem of polynomial evaluation with preprocessing of coefficients, we show a lower bound on the redundancy-query time tradeoff of the form (r + 1)t ≥ Ω(n/log n). In particular, for very small redundancies r, we get an almost optimal lower bound stating that the query algorithm has to inspect almost the entire data structure (up to a logarithmic factor). We show similar lower bounds for problems satisfying a certain combinatorial properties of a coding theoretic flavor, and obtain (r + 1)t > Q(n) for certain problems. Previously, no w(m) lower bounds were known on t in the general model for explicit Boolean problems, even for very small redundancies. By restricting our attention to systematic or index structures Φ satisfying Φ>(x) = x Φ* (x) for some map Φ* (where denotes concatenation), we show similar lower bounds on the redundancy-query time tradeoff for the natural data structuring problems of Prefix Sum and Substring Search.