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Re: [Coq-Club] New binary search tree discovered using Coq


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  • From: Frédéric Blanqui <frederic.blanqui AT inria.fr>
  • To: coq-club AT inria.fr
  • Subject: Re: [Coq-Club] New binary search tree discovered using Coq
  • Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 15:18:09 +0200

Hi! You may be interested by this message:

https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2014-06/msg00013.html

Le 09/06/2014 17:17, Jonathan a écrit :
A funny thing happened on the way to a counterexample...

I seem to have discovered, with Coq's help, a new type of balanced binary search tree, closely related to red-black and AVL trees. I'm calling them "gap trees".

See the file gaptree.txt in https://github.com/jonleivent/mindless-coding for details. The extracted OCaml code is in gaptree.ml and gaptree.mli - which were extracted from the proofs in gaptree.v. As mentioned in gaptree.txt, I was trying to see how the treatment I had given red-black and AVL trees in that git repository would fare on a structure that doesn't work properly. So I devised a related structure that didn't obviously not work, and churned away at it in Coq. And, much to my surprise, it didn't not work.

If gap trees are new - it's a bit of a wonder how they managed to avoid being discovered until now. Which makes me suspect that either they don't work or were discovered before - but I can't find anything similar when searching for binary search tree structures on the internet (there's certainly lots of stuff on red-black and AVL trees, though), and I don't see any holes in the Coq proofs.

Does anyone know if gap trees were discovered previously? Would anyone like to examine this result to check if there are any flaws in the gap tree algorithms? Or, does anyone on this list know of someone who might want to try that?

-- Jonathan





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