# Consistent Hashing

Daniel Lewin was an Israeli-American mathematician and entrepreneur. He was aboard the American Airlines Flight 11, which was hijacked by al-Qaeda during the September 11 attacks.

Tom Leighton is a professor (on leave) of Applied Mathematics at CSAIL @ MIT and an expert on algorithms for network applications.

Together, Lewin and Leighton founded the company Akamai, which was a pioneer in the business of content delivery networks (CDNs) and is currently one of the top players in the segment. One of the key technologies employed by the company was the use of consistent hashing, which we’ll present in this post.

### Motivation

One of the main purposes of the CDN is to be a cache for static data. Due to large amounts of data, we cannot possibly store the cache in a single machine. Instead we’ll have many servers each of which will be responsible for storing a portion of the data.

We can see this as a distributed key-value store, and we have two main operations: read and write. For the write part, we provide the data to be written and an associated key (address). For the read part, we provide the key and the system either returns the stored data or decides it doesn’t exist.

In scenarios where we cannot make any assumptions over the pattern of data and keys, we can try to distribute the entries uniformly over the set of servers. One simple way to do this is to hash the keys and get the remainder of the division by N (mod N), where N corresponds to the number of servers. Then we assign the entry (key, value) to the corresponding server.

The problem arises when the set of servers changes very frequently. This can happen in practice, for example, if servers fail and need to be put offline, or we might need to reintroduce servers after reboots or even add new servers for scaling.

Changing the value of N would cause almost complete redistribution of the keys to different servers which is very inefficient. We need to devise a way to hash the keys in a way that adding or removing servers will only require few keys from changing servers.

### Consistent Hashing

The key idea of the consistent hashing algorithm is to include the key for the server in the hash table. A possible key for the server could be its IP address.

Say that our hash function h() generates a 32-bit integer. Then, to determine to which server we will send a key k, we find the server s whose hash h(s) is the smallest that is larger than h(k). To make the process simpler, we assume the table is circular, which means that if we cannot find a server with hash larger than h(k), we wrap around and start looking from the beginning of the array.

Big blue circles are servers, orange circles are keys. Right: If we remove server S3, only entries corresponding to keys K5 and K4 need to be moved / re-assigned.

If we assume that the hash distributes the keys uniformly, including the server keys, we’ll still get a uniform distribution of keys to each server.

The advantage comes to when adding and removing servers to the list. When adding a new server sx to the system, its hash will be in between 2 server hashes, say h(s1) and h(s2) in the circle. Only the keys from h(s1) to h(sx), which belonged to s2, will change servers, to sx. Conversely, when removing a server sx, only the keys assigned to it will need to go to a different server, in this case the server that immediately follows sx.

How can we find the server associated to a given key? The naive way is to scan linearly the hashes until we find a server hash. A more efficient way is to keep the server hashes in a binary balanced search tree, so we can find the leaf with the smallest value larger that h(x) in O(log n), while adding and removing servers to the tree is also a O(log n) operation.

### Implementation in Rust

We will provide an implementation of the ideas above in Rust as an exercise. We define the interface of our structure as

Note that we’ll store the list of servers (containers) and keys (entries) in separate structures. We can store the entries in a simple hash table since we just need efficient insertion, deletion and look up. For the containers we need insertion, deletion but also finding the smallest element that is larger than a given value, which we’ll call successor. As we discussed above, we can use a binary balanced search tree which allow all these operations in O(log n), for example a Red-Black tree. I found this Rust implementation of the Red-Black tree [1].

Finally, we also include the hash function as part of the structure in case we want customize the implementation (handy for testing), but we can provide a default implementation.

To “construct” a new structure, we define a method new() in the implementation section, and use farmhash as the default implementation for the hash function [2].

The insertion and removal are already provided by the data structures, and are trivial to extend to ours. The interesting method is determining the server corresponding to a given key, namely get_container_id_for_entry().

In there we need to traverse the Red-Black tree to find the successor of our value v. The API of the Red-Black tree doesn’t have such method, only one to search for the exact key. However due to the nature of binary search trees, we can guarantee that the smallest element greater than the searched value v will be visited while searching for v.

Thus, we can modify the search algorithm to include a visitor, that is, a callback that is called whenever a node is visited during the search. In the code below we start with a reference to the root, temp, and in a loop we keep traversing the tree depending on comparison between the key and the value at the current node.

Let’s take a detour to study the Rust code a bit. First, we see the unsafe block [3]. It can be used to de-reference a raw pointer. A raw pointer is similar to a C pointer, i.e. it points to a specific memory address. When we de-reference the pointer, we have access to the value stored in that memory address. For example:

The reason we need the unsafe block in our implementation is that self.root is a raw pointer to RBTreeNode, as we can see in line 1 and 4 below:

The other part worth mentioning is the type of the visitor function. It’s defined as

It relies on several concepts from Rust, including Traits, Closures, and Trait Bounds [4, 5]. The syntax indicates that the type of visitor must be FnMut(&K), which in turns mean a closure that has a single parameter of type &K (K is the type of the key of the RB tree). There are three traits a closure can implement: Fn, FnMut and FnOnce. FnMut allows closures that can capture and mutate variables in their environment (see Capturing the Environment with Closures). We need this because our visitor will update a variable defined outside of the closure as we’ll see next.

We are now done with our detour into the Rust features realm, so we can analyze the closure we pass as visitor. It’s a simple idea: whenever we visit a node, we check if it’s greater than our searched value and if it’s smaller than the one we found so far. It’s worth noticing we define closest_key outside of the closure but mutate it inside it:

We also need to handle a corner case which is that if the hash of the value is larger than all of those of the containers, in which case we wrap around our virtual circular table and return the container with smallest hash:

The full implementation is on Github and it also contains a set of basic unit tests.

### Conclusion

The idea of a consistent hash is very clever. It relies on the fact that binary search trees can be used to search not only exact values (those stored in the nodes) but also the closest value to a given query.

In a sense, this use of binary trees is analogous to a common use of quad-trees, which is to subdivide the 2d space into regions. In our case we’re subdividing the 1d line into segments, or more precisely, we’re subdividing  a 1d circumference into segments, since our line wraps around.

I struggled quite a bit with the Rust strict typing, especially around passing lambda functions as arguments and also setting up the testing. I found the mocking capability from the Rust toolchain lacking, and decided to work with dependency injection to mock the hash function and easier to test. I did learn a ton, though!

### References

[1] GitHub: /tickbh/rbtree-rs
[2] GitHub: seiflotfy/rust-farmhash
[3] The Rust Programming Language book – Ch19: Unsafe Rust
[4] The Rust Programming Language book – Ch13: Closures: Anonymous Functions that Can Capture Their Environment
[5] The Rust Programming Language book – Ch13: Traits: Defining Shared Behavior

# Log Structured Merge Trees

In this post we’ll discuss a data structure called Log Structured Merge Trees or LSM Trees for short. It provides a good alternative to structures like B+ Trees when the use case is more write-intensive.

According to [1], hardware advances are doing more for read performance than they are for writes. Thus it makes sense to select a write-optimised file structure.

### B+ Trees and Append Logs

B+ Trees add structure to data in such a way that the read operation is efficient. It organizes the data in a tree structure and performs regular rebalancing to keep the tree height small so that we never need to look up too many entries to find a record.

If the B+ Tree is stored in disk, updating it requires performing random access which is expensive for a spinning disk. Random access is order of magnitudes slower than sequential access in disk. Adam Jacobs [3] describes an experiment where sequential access achieves a throughput of ~50M access/second while a random access only 300 (100,000x slower!). SSDs have a smaller gap ~40M access/second for sequential access and 2000 access/second for random access.

The other extreme alternative to avoid disk seeks when writing is just to append content sequentially. We can do this by appending rows to a log file. The problem of this is that the stored data has no structure so searching for a record would require scanning the entire dataset in the worst case!

The LSM Tree aims to combine the best of both worlds to achieve better write throughput without sacrificing too much of read performance. The overall idea is to write to a log file but as the file gets too large, restructure the data to optimize reads. We can see it as a lazy data structure data gets updated in batches.

First we’ll describe the original version of LSM Trees and then an improved version with better performance for real world applications and used by databases like LevelDB [4].

### LSM Trees

Let’s study LSM Trees applies to the implementation of a key-value database. Writes are initially done to an in-memory structure called memtable, where the keys are kept sorted (random access of RAM is not expensive). Once the table “fills up”, it’s persisted in disk as an immutable (read-only) file.

Figure 1: Inserting new key in memtable

Searching for a key consists in scanning each file and within a file we can keep an index for the keys, so we can quickly find a record. Note that a key might appear in multiple files representing multiple updates to that key. We can scan the files by the most recent first because that would contain the last update to the key. The major cost of searching is due to the linear scanning of the files. As our database grows, the number of files will become too large to scan linearly.

Figure 2: Writing memtable to a file

To avoid that, once the number of files grow past a given number, we merge every pair of files into a new file using an external merge sort to keep the keys sorted. The linear factor of the search was cut in half, and while the file size doubled, the cost was sublinear, O(log n), so the search became twice as fast. This approach is known as tiered compaction [2].

The main disadvantage of this method is that once the files get past a certain size, the merge operation starts getting costly. Given m sorted files of size S, the merge operation would be O(m S log S). While this compaction will happen rather infrequently (roughly when the database doubles in size), it will take a really long time for that one time it happens.

Figure 3: Tiered compation

This resembles the discussion of amortized analysis for data structures [5]. We saw that while amortized complexity may yield efficient average performance of a data structure, there are situations where we cannot afford the worst case scenario, even if it happens very rarely.

### LSM with Level Compaction

An alternative approach to work around expensive worst case scenarios is to keep the file sizes small (under 2MB) and divide them into levels. Excluding the first level which is special, the set of keys each two files at a given level contain must be disjoint, that is, a given key cannot appear in more than one file at the same level. Each level can contain multiple files, but the total size of the files should be under a limit. Each level is k times larger than the previous one. In LevelDB [4], level L has a (10^L) MB size limit (that is, 10MB for level 1, 100MB for level 2, etc).

Promotion. Whenever a given level reaches its size limit, one of the files at that level is selected to be merged with the next level or promoted. To keep the property of disjoint keys satisfied, we first identify which files in the next level have duplicated keys with the file being merged and then merge all these files together. Instead of outputting a single combined file like in the tiered compaction, we output many files of size up to 2MB. During the merge, if we find collisions, the key from the lower level is more recent, so we can just discard the key from the high level.

Figure 4: Promotion from Level 0 to Level 1

#### Details

When merging, to detect which files contain a given key, we can use Bloom filters for each file. Recall that a bloom filter allows us to check whether a given key belongs to a set with low memory usage. If it says the key is not in the set, we know it’s correct, while if it says it is in the set, then there’s a chance it is wrong. So we can quickly check whether a given key belongs to a file with low memory footprint.

The first level is special because the keys don’t need to be disjoint, but when merging a file from this first level, we also include the files where that key is present. This way we guarantee that the most up-to-date key is at the lowest level it is found.

To select which file to be merged with the next level we use a round-robin approach. We keep track of which file was merged last and then pick the next one. This can be used to make sure that every file eventually gets promoted.

When outputting files from the merge operation, we might output files with less than 2MB in case we detect the current file would overlap with too many files (in LevelDB it’s 10) in the next level. This is to avoid having to merge too many files when this file gets promoted in the future.

#### Cost Analysis

Since the files sizes are bounded to 2MB, merging files is a relatively cheap operation. We saw above that we can limit the file to not contain too many duplicate keys with the files at the next level, so we’ll only have to merge around 11 files, for a total of 11MB of data, so we can easily do the merge sort in memory.

The promotion might also cascade through the next levels since once we promote a file from level t to t+1, it might overflow level t+1, which will require another promotion as well. This in fact will be common because merging only moves off 2MB worth of data to the next level, so it will require a promotion the next time it receives a new file from the level below (ignoring the fact that keys get overwritten during the merge). Fortunately the number of levels L grows O(log n) the size of the data. So for LevelDB, where the first level size limit is 100MB, even for a disk with 100TB capacity, we would still need only about 8 levels.

The fact that each key belongs to at most one file at each level allows us to keep an index (e.g. a hash table in disk) of keys to files for each level. (This of course excludes the first level, but it has a small number of files, so linear search is not expensive).

One interesting property is that each level acts as some sort of write-through cache. Whenever a key gets updated, it’s inserted at a file at lower levels. It will take many promotions for it to be placed at a higher level with other files. This means that searching for a key that has been recently updated will require scanning very few levels or smaller indexes since it will be found at lower levels.

### References

[1] ben stopford – Log Structured Merge Trees
[2] Datastax – Leveled Compaction in Apache Cassandra
[3] ACM Queue – The Pathologies of Big Data
[4] LevelDB – Wiki
[5] NP-Incompleteness – Eliminating Amortization

# Generalized Tries in OCaml

In Chapter 10 of Purely Functional Data Structures, Okasaki describes a generalized trie. In this post we’ll see how tries can be seen as maps over a specific type of keys and how we can construct maps over any type of keys.

We discussed tries in OCaml in a previous post. At first glance, it looks like a special data structure but we’ll now see it’s basically a map.

The basic form of a map is a pair of (key, value). In most programming languages the key has to be a scalar (e.g. int, string) or some complex that can be converted to one (think of hashCode() in Java).

For simplicity, let’s assume our scalar is an int and our value is of generic type T. Also, note that the syntax we present below is not valid OCaml (I find OCaml’s type syntax a bit hard to read). A map with int keys can be represented as:

map<int, T>


If we want a two dimensional key, for example (int, int), we can have a map of maps:

map<int, map<int, T>>

and if the dimensions are not fixed, for example, a list of integers, then we can define a recursive structure for our map

map<list<int>, T> =
Node of (option<T> * map<int, mapOverList>)


If we think of strings as lists of characters, a trie is then a map where the key is a list of characters. From the type above we can simply change the key of our map above to a list of characters and for a basic trie T is a boolean

map<string, bool> =
Node of (bool * map<char, mapOverList>)


Note that option<bool> is redundant, so we can use bool only.

#### Maps over trees

We can now generalize the key to more complex recursive types such as trees. Suppose we fave the following type for tree:

tree<int> = (int * tree<int> * tree<int>)

The outermost map is indexed by the root of the tree. The inner maps are indexed by the left and right subtrees respectively:

map<tree<int>, T> =
map<int, map<tree<int>, map<tree<int>, T>>>

If we expand the key of the second map we get the following:

map<tree<int>, map<tree<int>, T>> =
map<int, map<tree<int>, map<tree<int>, map<tree<int>, T>>>

It gets pretty involved very quickly but because we traverse these types recursively, the implementation is still simple. Let’s see how to implement these in OCaml. The type of a map over an int tree can be defined as follows:

Note that the outermost map is a regular IntMap, which uses the root element of the map, a scalar, as key.

The search function takes a tree representing the key, and the map. The base case is when the tree is empty, when we’re just past a leaf. The recursive case consists in obtaining the maps in order, first using the root element, then using the left tree and finally using the right tree:

Note that the recursive call is non-uniform, so we need explicit annotations, as we discussed previously.

The insertion is similar, expect that when we fail to find a key in any of the maps, we need to first insert it with an empty element before recursing.

Because the Map.find() implementation throws exceptions when a key doesn’t exist, we can wrap the call with a try and if an exception occurs, we can insert the missing key (alternatively we could use Map.mem()).

#### Maps over products and sums

There are two ways a structure can branch out recursively: through combination or through alternative. For a combination, refer to our definition of Node:

Node of 'a * 'a tree * 'a tree

In theory, any combination of values for 'a, 'a tree, 'a tree are possible values for a Node. The * in between the components in fact represent the cartesian product operator. This is also known as product.

For alternative, the type of the tree itself can be either Empty or Node:

type 'a tree = Empty | Node of (...)

In this case, the valid values for a tree is the sum of values of each alternative. Hence, this is also known as sum.

We can generalize the map with keys of any types by looking at their definition. If it’s a product, we end up with nested maps. For example, if

Tk = (Tk1 * Tk2)

then the map over Tk can be defined as

map<Tk, T> = map<Tk1, map<Tk2, T>>

In our example, this came the nested maps 'a trie trie IntMap.t.

For sums, if the type is

Tk = Tk1 | Tk2

the map over Tk would end up as a product of maps:

map<Tk, T> = (map<Tk1, T> * map<Tk2, T>)

In our example, this came the product ('a option) and ('a trie trie IntMap.t). option can be thought as a one-dimensional map.

### Conclusion

In this post we saw how a trie can be modeled as a map using the same principles as the ones we use to construct matrices, that is, two-dimensional maps (nested maps). We then generalized the string keys to trees, and implemented the insert/find functions in OCaml. I found it pretty hard to reason about these structures.

We then went a step further and saw how to construct maps based on the key structure. And we learned about product and sum of types when discussing recursive types.

# Mutually Recursive Modules in OCaml

In Chapter 10 of Purely Functional Data Structures, Okasaki describes a technique called data structure bootstrapping. It’s a way to reuse existing implementation of data structures to construct (bootstrap) new ones.

In one of the examples he creates a new heap implementation with an efficient merge operation using another heap as basis, but it turns out that to implement this, we need to rely on mutually recursive modules, that is, two modules A and B, where A depends on B, and B depends on A.

In this post we’ll study the bootstrapped heap and learn how to implement mutually recursive modules in OCaml.

### Heap with efficient merging

Assume we have a heap implementation with O(1) insert, and O(log n) merge, findMin and deleteMin operations. We’ve seen such an implementation with Skewed Binomial Heaps

We’ll see how to construct a new heap implementation which will improve the merge complexity to O(1).

Let’s call the base heap PrimaryHeap and define our heap type as

this type can be either empty or a node with an element (root) and a primary heap whose element is the bootstrapped heap itself, that is, heap and PrimaryHeap.heap form a mutually recursive types. Note that the above is not a valid OCaml code. We’re using it to explain the theoretical concepts.

We can think of this as a k-ary tree where the element is the root and the children of that node are the subtrees, but these subtrees are stored in a heap instead of an array.

The root element at each node is the smallest among all of the subtrees. Hence, to obtain the minimum element for a heap, findMin, is trivial: we can simply return that element:

Merging two bootstrapped heaps is analogous to linking two trees. The only invariant we need to maintain is that the smallest root continues being the root.

Since the primary heap has O(1) insert, the bootstrapped heap has O(1) merge, which was our goal. Note that we can implement insert using merge by creating a singleton node and merging it with an existing heap.

We need to handle the deletion of the minimum element, which is the more involved operation. It consists in discarding the root of the present node, and finding a new root from the primary heap.

Since each element in the primary heap is a bootstrapped heap, we first obtain the bootstrapped heap containing the smallest element:

then we remove this node from the primaryHeap, and we merge the minPrimaryHeap back into primaryHeap.

finally we make newMinElem the new root element of our top level bootstrapped heap. The complete code is

The only missing part is defining the correct type of the bootstrapped heap.

### Mutually Recursive Modules

Drawing Hands by M. C. Escher

Okasaki mentions that recursive structures are not supported in Standard ML (at least at the time my copy of the book was printed), but they are supported in OCaml.

To make modules mutually depend on another, we need to mark it as recursive via the rec keyword, and declaring both modules at the same time by using the and connector. Let’s work with a toy example: two modules Even and Odd, where each depend on the other.

This will lead to a compilation error:

Error: Recursive modules require an explicit module type.

We need to write the signatures explicitly:

This blog post from Jane Street describes a way to define mutually recursive modules by only listing its signatures:

The OCaml compiler can infer the implementation part from the type definitions, but unfortunately this won’t work if the module has function definitions, which is the case for our heap implementation.

Things get more complicated in our case because the primary heap implementation uses a functor to generate a heap taking the element’s module as parameter. In this case the element’s module is our bootstrapped heap. A valid module definition is given below:

Let’s understand what is going on.

type t = Empty | Heap of Element.t * PrimaryHeap.heap

is the definition we presented above. We also implement the methods from the Set.OrderedType interface, namely compare, since this is the interface the heap maker expects. The comparison is based solely on the root element.

Then we declare the PrimaryHeap type at the same time, with type IHeapWithMerge, and because tv is unbound in that interface, we need to bind it to BootstrappedElement.t:

PrimaryHeap: IHeapWithMerge with type tv := BootstrappedElement.t

Finally we provide the implementation, using the result of the SkewBinomialHeap() functor having the BootstrappedElement module as element type:

PrimaryHeap (...) = SkewBinomialHeap(BootstrappedElement)

The syntax is pretty involved, but it accomplishes what we wanted. We can further refine this definition by adding

include Set.OrderedType with type t := t

to the BootstrappedElement signature. This includes all the interface of Set.OrderedType.

These newly defined modules are defined within a functor, the BootstrappedHeap, together with the methods we defined above. Like other heap generators, the functor takes a module representing the element type as parameter. In this case we can also allow the primary heap type to be passed as parameter so we don’t have to use SkewBinomialHeap as implementation. Any heap with merge will do.

The constructors define within BootstrappedElement are visible within BootstrappedHeap but they need qualification, such as BootstrappedElement.Heap. To avoid repeating this qualifier, we can use:

include BootstrappedElement

The complete implementation for BootstrappedHeap can be found on github.

### Conclusion

The idea of using implementations of a given data structure to yield improve implementations is amazing! The mutual recursion nature of the bootstrap heap got me at first, but making analogies with a k-ary tree made it easier to understand.

I was struggling a lot to get the syntax right for the recursive modules required for this implementation until I stumbled upon this github repository, from which I learned many new things about OCaml.

### References

[1] Purely Function Data Structures, Chapter 10 – Chris Okasaki
[2] Jane Street Tech Blog – A trick: recursive modules from recursive signatures

# Polymorphic Recursion in OCaml

In Chapter 10 of Purely Functional Data Structures, Okasaki describes recursive types that are non-uniform. In this post we’ll learn more about these types, how to implement them in OCaml and see an example by studying the implementation of Random Access Binary Lists using such a construct.

#### Uniform recursive type

As an example of uniform recursive data structure we have a simple list

Cons(1, Cons(2, Cons(3, Nil)))

Which has a recursive type, for example

type 'a myList = Nil | Cons of 'a * 'a myList

Each element of the list is either Nil (terminal) or it has a value of a polymorphic type 'a, followed a recursive list also of type 'a.

#### Non-uniform recursive type

Now, say that the type of the recursive list is not the same as the current list? Then we have a non-uniform polymorphic recursive type, for example:

type 'a seq = Nil | Cons of 'a * ('a * 'a) seq

We’ll name this a sequence. A int seq would have the value in the first node would have type int, but the element from the second node would have type (int, int), the third type ((int, int), (int, int)) and so on. This structure is equivalent to a complete binary tree, where the i-th element of seq represents the i-th level of the tree.

An example of value with this type is:

Cons (1, Cons ((2, 3), Cons (((4, 5), (6, 7)), Nil)))

We need a special syntax to type recursive functions that take recursive non-uniform types, because the type of the function called recursively might be a different polymorphic type than the caller. OCaml by default tries to infer the generic types of the function and bind them to specific instances [2]. For example, in

let f: 'a list -> 'a list = fun x -> 13 :: x

OCaml will assume 'a is int and will compile fine. We can see this by pasting that code in the command line, utop.

utop # let f: 'a list -> 'a list = fun x -> 13 :: x;; val f : int list -> int list = 

The function will then not be polymorphic anymore. To prevent OCaml from auto-binding specific type instances, we can use a special syntax introduced in OCaml 3.12 [3]

utop # let f3: 'a. 'a list -> 'a list = fun x -> 13 :: x;; 

This time we’ll get a compilation error:

Error: This definition has type int list -> int list which is less general than ‘a. ‘a list -> ‘a list

The important thing is that this allow us binding the recursive calls with different types. According to the Jane Street Tech Blog [3]:

Note that a polymorphic type annotation holds inside the body of a recursive definition as well as outside, allowing what is known as polymorphic recursion, where a recursive call is made at some non-trivial instantiation of the polymorphic type.

So for example, we can write this function to calculate the size of a sequence:

The problem with this structure is that it can only represent lists of size in the form of 2^k - 1. To work around that, we allow some items to not hold any elements at all, so that each item corresponds to a digit in the binary representation of the size of the list.

type 'a seq = Nil | Zero of ('a * 'a) seq | One of 'a * ('a * 'a) seq

For example, we can now represent a list of 10 elements, as

Zero(One((1, 2), Zero(One(((3, 4), (5, 6)), ((7, 8),(9, 10))), Nil))))

### Sequence binary random access list

We can use a sequence to implement a random access binary access list in a concise way.

#### Insertion

Inserting an element at the beginning is analogous to incrementing the binary number, that is, starting from the least significant digit, if it’s a zero, we make it one, if it’s one we make it a 0, and carry over a 1, by adding it to the next digit.

The carry over process is simple in this structure. Because the type of an item following an item of type 'a is ('a, 'a), to merge the element to be added with the existing element, we simply make a tuple and pass it to the recursive call.

Removing or retrieving the first element is analogous to decrementing a binary number. If the digit is one, we make it zero and return the element and the resulting list. If it’s a zero, we make a recursive call to get the next available element. However since the returned element is of type ('a, 'a), and our return type is 'a, we only use the first value of the pair.

Implementing head and tail using popAux is now trivial

#### Lookup

Finding an element can be done by transforming the problem into smaller instances.

It helps to look at some simple examples. Let’s consider 3 cases.

Case 1. If we had a single element, we either return it if the index is 0, or throw if it’s larger than that.

0: (0)

Case 2. If we have 2 elements,

0: () 1: (0, 1) 

Notice that when we go from the first level to the second, all items “doubled” in size, so we can “transform” this to the single element case by treating pairs as a single element, but since the index has individual elements granularity, we need to transform it by halving it. We reduced it to Case 1.

If our initial index was either 0 or 1, it’s now 0, and we found our element in level 1.

 1: (0)

The problem is that we need to return a single element at level 0, not a pair, so we need to undo the transformation. We can use the parity of the original index will to decide which side of the pair to return. If it’s even, we return the first element, otherwise the second one.

Case 3. If we have 3 elements,
0: (0) 1: (1, 2) 

and our index is larger than 0, we move to the next level but we need to account for the level we’re skipping, so the transformation of index would look like:
0: () 1: (0) 

which is reduced to Case 2.

These 3 cases can be used to find elements larger than 3. For example, say we have 10 elements and want to find the element at position 6:

0: () 1: (0, 1) 2: () 3: (((2, 3), (4, 5)), ((6, 7), (8, 9)))

Step 1. This is Case 2. We need to transform this by treating pairs as elements and halving the index:

1': (0) 2': () 3': ((1, 2), (3, 4))

Note how this reduced the problem of finding the element at position 3 of a list with size 5. Step 2. We now are in case 3, where we need to skip the current element:

1': () 2': () 3': (((0), (1)), ((2), (3)))

Our index is now 2. Step 3. we go one level down
 2: () 3: (0, 1)

With an index of 1. Step 4. Finally, we halve it once again and we finally found the right level that contains our index.

3: (0)

We now need to recurse back to find exactly which element on that level to pick. On Step 4, we can see our index 1 was on the right side of the pair in level 3, so we pick the right side, that is, ((6, 7), (8, 9)).

On Step 3, our index 2 was on the left size of the innermost pair, that is (6, 7). On Step 2, we skipped the current element but didn’t change levels, so there’s no need to choose an element from the pair. Finally, on Step 1, the index 6 was on the left side of the innermost pair, which should return the element with a corresponding index 6.

In general, we can tell which side of the innermost pair to pick by observing that the indexes are ordered from left to right in a given level. And because every level has an even number of elements, we can assume that the first index in the level – or the first element in the first pair – is even. Hence the parity of the index is sufficient to determine which side of the pair to pick.

With this algorithm in mind, the lookup function is quite compact:

The update follows a similar idea as the lookup, but the problem is that we need to return the updated level when returning from the recursion. That is, we need to update the level before returning.

To accomplish that, we can pass a callback, the updater, that encodes which pair we would pick at each level. We start with a function that simply returns the element to be updated

(fun _ -> element)

Then, at each level we create a new updater, which applies the previous updater on the left or right side of the pair, depending on the parity of the index:

When we finally find the level that has our index, we can apply the function, which has the effect of “narrowing” down the elements from a given level to a single element, replacing the value at the target index and then returning the updated elements when returning from the recursion.

After applying the updater, we return the updated level recursively.

### Structural Decomposition

Okasaki introduces this implementation in the context of Structural Decomposition, which is a technique for creating data structures from incomplete ones. In this example, the raw implementation of the sequence can only represent lists of size 2^k, but modeling each node in the sequence to be zero or one, zero not having any elements, we can work around the size restriction.

### Conclusion

The implementation of random access binary access list using sequences is very neat, but very hard to understand.

One of the major selling points of shorter code is that it tends to contain less bugs and also less corner cases. On the other hand, if the code is also harder to read and understand, it might be harder to spot bugs.

This post helped me understand a bit more about OCaml’s type system. Digging a little also led me to interesting topics such as Parametric Polymorphism [4] and Existential vs. Universally quantified types [5].

### References

[1] Purely Function Data Structures – Chris Okasaki
[2] Jane Street – Ensuring that a function is polymorphic
[3] Ensuring that a function is polymorphic in Ocaml 3.12
[4] Wikipedia – Parametric polymorphism
[5] Existential vs. Universally quantified types in Haskell

# Numerical Representations as inspiration for Data Structures

In this chapter Okasaki describes a technique for developing efficient data structures through analogies with numerical representations, in particular the binary and its variations.

We’ve seen this pattern arise with Binomial Heaps in the past. Here the author presents the technique in its general form and applies it to another data structure, binary random access lists.

### Binary Random Access Lists

These lists allows efficient insertion at/removal from the beginning, and also access and update at a particular index.

The simple version of this structure consists in distributing the elements in complete binary leaf trees. A complete binary leaf tree (CBLF) is one that only stores elements only at the leaves, so a tree with height i, has 2^(i+1)-1 nodes, but only 2^i elements.

Consider an array of size n, and let Bn be the binary representation of n. If the i-th digit of Bn is 1, then we have a tree containing 2^i leaves. We then distribute the elements into these trees, starting with the least significant digit (i.e. the smallest tree) and traversing the tree in
pre-order.

For example, an array of elements (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) has 11 elements, which is 1011 in binary. So we have one tree with a single leave (1), a tree with 2 leaves (2, 3) and another containing 8 leaves (4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).

We use a dense representation of the binary number, by having explicit elements for the 0 digit. Here’s a possible signature for this implementation:

Inserting a new element consists in adding a new tree with a single leave. If a tree already exists for a given size, they have to be merged into a tree of the next index. Merging two CBLFs of the same size is straightforward. We just need to make them children of a new root. Since elements are stored in pre-order, the tree being inserted or coming from carry over should be the left child.

Looping back to our example, if we want to insert the element 100, we first insert a tree with a single leaf (100). Since the least significant digit already has an element, we need to merge them into a new tree containing (100, 1) and try to insert at the next position. A conflict will arise with (2, 3), so we again merge them into (100, 1, 2, 3) and try the next position. We finally succeed in inserting at position 2, for a new list containing trees like (100, 1, 2, 3) and (4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).

The complexity of inserting an element is O(log n) in the worst case which requires merging tree for all digits (e.g. if Bn = 111...111). Merging two trees is O(1).

Removing the first element is analogous to decrementing the number, borrowing from the next digit if the current digit is 0.

Searching for an index consists in first finding the tree containing the index and then searching within the tree. More specifically, because the elements are sorted beginning from the smallest tree to the largest, we can find the right tree just by inspecting the number of elements in each tree until we find the one whose range includes the desired index. Within a tree, elements are stored in pre-order, so we can find the right index in O(height) of the tree.

After finding the right index, returning the element at that index is trivial. Updating the element at a given index requires rebuilding the tree when returning from the recursive calls.

Okasaki then proposes a few different numbering systems that allow to perform insertion/removal in O(1) time. Here we’ll only discuss the less obvious but more elegant one, using skew binary numbers.

### Skew Binary Random Access Lists

A skew binary number representation supports the digits 0, 1 and 2.

The weight of the i-th digit is 2^(i+1) - 1. In its canonical form, it only allows the least significant non-zero digit to be 2.

Examples:

Decimal and Skewed Binary

It’s possible to show this number system offers a unique representation for decimal numbers. See the Appendix for a sketch of the proof and an algorithm for converting decimals to skewed binary numbers.

Incrementing a number follows these rules:

• If there’s a digit 2 in the number, turn it into 0 and increment the next digit. By definition that is either 0 or 1, so we can safely increment it without having to continue carrying over.
• Otherwise the least significant digit is either 0 or 1, and it can be incremented without carry overs.

The advantage of this number system is that increments (similarly, decrements) never carry over more than once so the complexity O(1), as opposed to the worst-case O(log n) for regular binary numbers.

A skew binary random access list can be implemented using this idea. We use a sparse representation (that is, not including 0s). Each digit one with position i corresponds to a tree with (2^(i+1) - 1) elements, in this case a complete binary tree with height i+1. A digit 2 is represented by two consecutive trees
with same weight.

Adding a new element to the beginning of the list is analogous to incrementing the number, which we saw can be done in O(1). Converting a digit 0 to 1 or 1 to 2, is a matter of prepending a tree to a list. To convert a 2 to 0 and increment the next position, we need to merge two trees representing it with the element to be inserted. Because each tree is traversed in pre-order, we make the element the root of the tree.

Elements are inserted in pre-order in each tree, so when searching for an
index, we can first find the right tree by looking at the tree sizes and within a tree we can do a “binary search” in O(height) of the tree.

### Binomial Heaps

In this chapter, this technique is also applied to improve the worst case runtime of insertion of binomial heaps. The implementation, named Skewed Binomial Heap, is on github.

### Conclusion

This chapter demonstrated that binary representations are a useful analogy to come up with data structures and algorithms, because they’re simple. This simplicity can lead to inefficient running times, though. Representations such as skewed binary numbers can improve the worst case of some operations with the trade-off of less intuitive and more complex implementations.

### Appendix A – Proof

Sketch of the proof. First, it’s obvious that two different decimals cannot map to the same binary representation. Otherwise the same equation with the same weights would result in different values. We need to show that two binary representations do not map to the same decimal.

Suppose it does, and let them be B1 and B2. Let k be the largest position where these number have a different digit. Without loss of generality, suppose that B1[k] > B2[k].

First case. suppose that B1[k] = 1, and B2[k] = 0 and B2 doesn’t have any digit 2. B1 is then at least $M + 2^{k+1} - 1$, while B2 is at most $M + \sum_{i = 1}^{k} (2^{i} - 1)$ which is $M + 2^{k + 1} - k$ (M corresponds to the total weight of digits in positions > k). This implies that B2 < B1, a contradiction.

Second case. suppose that B1[k] = 1, but now B2 does have a digit 2 at position j. It has to be that j < k. Since only zeros follow it, we can write B2‘s upper bound as

$M + \sum_{i = j + 1}^{k} (2^{i} - 1) + 2^{j + 1} - 1$

Since $2(2^{j + 1} - 1) < 2^{j + 2} - 1$, we have

$\sum_{i = j + 1}^{k} (2^{i} - 1) + 2^{j + 1} - 1 < \sum_{i = j + 2}^{k} (2^{i} - 1) + 2^{j + 2} - 1$

We can continue this argument until we get that B2 is less than $M + 2(2^{k} - 1)$ which is less than $M + 2^{k + 1} - 1$, B1.

Third case. Finally, suppose we have B1' such that B1'[k] = 2, and B2'[k] = 1. We can subtract $2^{k+1} - 1$ from both and reduce to the previous case. ▢

### Appendix B – Conversion algorithm

Converting from a decimal representation to a binary one is straightforward, but it’s more involved to do so for skewed binary numbers.

Suppose we allow trailing zeros and have all the numbers with k-digits. For example, if k=2, we have 00, 01, 02, 10, 11, 12 and 20. We can construct the numbers with k+1-digits by either prefixing 0 or 1, and the additional 2 followed by k zeros. For k=3, we have 000, 001, 002, 010, 011, 012, 020, 100, 101, 102, 110, 111, 112, 120 and finally 200.

More generally, we can see there are 2^(k+1) - 1 numbers with k digits. We can construct the k+1 digits by appending 0 or 1 and then adding an extra number which is starts 2 and is followed by k zeros, for a total of 2^(k+1) - 1 + 2^(k+1) - 1 + 1 = 2^(k + 2) - 1, so we can see this invariant holds by induction on k, and we verify that is true for the base, since for k = 1 we enumerated 3 numbers.

This gives us a method to construct the skewed number representation if we know the number of its digits say, k. If the number is the first 2^(k) - 1 numbers, that is, between 0 and 2^k - 2, we know it starts with a 0. If it’s the next 2^(k) - 1, that is, between 2^k - 1 and 2^(k+1) - 3, we know it starts with a 1. If it’s the next one, exactly 2^(k+1) - 2, we know it starts with a 2.

We can continue recursively by subtracting the corresponding weight for this digit until k = 0. We can find out how many digits a number n has (if we’re to exclude leading zeros) by find the smallest k such that 2^(k+1)-1 is greater than n. For example, for 8, the smallest k is 3, since 2^(k+1)-1 = 15, and 2^(k)-1 = 7.

The Python code below uses these ideas to find the skewed binary number representation in O(log n):

One might ask: why not OCaml? My excuse is that I already have a number theory repository in Python, so it seemed like a nice addition. Converting this to functional code, in particular OCaml is easy.

This algorithm requires an additional O(log n) memory, while the conversion to a binary number can be done with constant extra memory. My intuition is that this is possible because the weights for the binary numbers are powers of the same number, 2^k, unlike the skewed numbers’ weights. Is it possible to work around this?

# Lazy Rebuilding

In this chapter Okasaki starts with a common technique data structures use to achieve efficient complexity times. A classic example are balanced binary search trees, which, on one hand, need to be balanced to avoid degenerated cases (think of a binary tree which can degenerate to a path), but on the other hand, balancing is usually too expensive to perform at every operation.

The tradeoff is to allow a certain degree of “imbalance”, such that the big-O complexity of operations does not degenerate, and to let us perform re-balances only every so often, in a way that leads to an efficient amortized complexity. Structures such as AVL trees and Red-black trees make use of this technique.

The general technique is named batched rebuilding. The main issue with it though is that we saw that amortized analysis does not play well persistent data structures.

To address that problem, a technique was developed by Mark Overmars, called global rebuilding.

### Global Rebuilding

The basic idea is to keep two copies of a structure in parallel, one of which we perform incremental updates (write) and the other is used for read operations. After a few operations, we copy the write version into the read-only version. The idea is that the incremental updates are cheap, but might put the structure in a state that is not suitable for reading. This allows for distributing the costs across operations such that each operation has worst case efficient bounds.

The major downside of this technique is the complexity and corner cases, because we also need to account for changes to the structure that renders the write copy of the structure invalid.

We’ll now describe yet another implementation of queues that use this technique, developed by Robert Hood and Robert Melville. Similar to other queue implementations, this structure maintains a front and rear lists, the latter in reverse order. It also has the invariant that the rear list cannot be larger than the front.

When that happens we must perform a rotation, which consists in reversing the rear queue and appending it to the end of the front queue. We cannot perform this operation piecemeal, because we only have efficient access to the first element of a list. The operation we can do partially is concatenating the reverse of a list to the beginning of another list, that is, given xs and ys, we can do ~xs + ys, where ~ represents the reverse of a list. Note we can also reverse a list, that is xs to ~xs piecemeal by having ys = [].

Now, to achieve our goal which is xs + ~ys, we reverse both xs and ys, then concatenate the reverse of ~xs to ~ys:

1) Start with xs and ys
2) Reverse both: ~xs and ~ys
3) Then (~(~xs)) + ~ys which is xs + ~ys

We can perform these operations one step at a time by using a “state machine”, we first start with a state Reversing(xs, ys) which will reverse xs and ys at the same time into ~xs and ~ys, at which point we switch to the state Appending(~xs, ~yx) which will concatenate the xs into ~ys, so then we get to Done(xs + ~ys).

The problem of keeping a separate state is that it might not be accurate by the time it’s done. In particular, if we remove an element from the front, the Appending step can be shortcut. We can keep a count of how many of the elements in ~xs of Appending are still present. If, by the time we’re appending the number of present elements goes to 0, the last elements of ~xs (that is, the first elements of xs) have been removed, so they do not need to be transferred to ~ys.

A possible implementation of the states is:

The Idle is just a placeholder to make sure the state machine can keep going to the next state even when we’re not currently performing a rotation. The state transition definition is given by:

One important detail here is that Appending ({validCount = 0; front; rear}) must appear before the other matching rule for Appending, because the other one includes this.

When we remove an element from the front of the queue we need to update the number of valid elements in the front of the rotation state:

Similar to the Real-time queues, we can guarantee constant time worst case for all the operations if we execute the state machine twice for each operation. The check() function verifies if we need a rotation and also executes the nextStep() function twice.

The other operations are then straightforward. The only thing is that pop() must call the invalidate() function because it’s decreasing the size of front:

The full, up-to-date implementation in on github.

### Lazy Rebuilding

As we can see, the Hood-Melville implementation is quite involved. Okasaki argues that making use of lazy evaluation and memoization simplifies the implementation. We can indeed see that the implementation of Real-time queues is much cleaner.

One simplification is that we don’t have to sync the write copy with the read copy. We just need to make sure to execute items from the schedule by the time they are needed. Memoization will take care of the rest.

Another advantage in this case is that reversing and concatenating lazily evaluated lists does not require an intermediate reversal of the front, which means that we can remove the front element without the need to invalidate any items in the schedule.

The author provided more examples of lazy rebuilding for deques (double-ended queues) by first presenting an amortized version using the Banker’s method and then a lazy rebuilding version. The Banker’s deque and Real-time deque are also on my github.

### Conclusion

In this chapter the technique behind Real-time queues was formalized. I really enjoy the organization of the book in which the author presents a data structure and from there he extracts a generic pattern of technique that can be applicable to other cases.

When I was studying data structures I don’t recall learning about general techniques underlying existing data structures, such as batched rebuilding for AVL trees and Red-black trees. That would have been interesting.