Balanced trees

[Dan Stromberg]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 6:59 AM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
> On the other hand, log n, for n = 1 million, is just 20.  It's not hard
> to imagine a hash function which costs 20x what a node traversal does,
> in which case, the log n lookup is ahead for all n < 1 million.

FWIW, both the hash table and the tree will have constants.  So a tree
would be c*20 in its most significant term, and the hash table would
be d*1 in its.  The real-world performance depends quite a bit on
those constants at small values of n.  I don't really consider a
million all that big, but the meaning of "big" of course depends.