A Generalization of a Lower Bound Technique due to Fredman and Saks

Abstract

{In a seminal paper of 1989, Fredman and Saks proved lower bounds for some important data-structure problems in the cell probe model. In particular, lower bounds were established on worst-case and amortized operation cost for the union-find problem and the prefix sum problem. The goal of this paper is to turn their proof technique into a general tool that can be applied to different problems and computational models. To this end we define two quantities: Output Variability depends only on the model of computation. It indicates how much variation can be found in the results of a program with certain resource bounds. This measures in some sense the power of a model. Problem Variability characterizes in a similar sense the difficulty of the problem.