The pairing heap: A new form of self-adjusting heap

Recently, Fredman and Tarjan invented a new, especially efficient form of heap (priority queue) called the Fibonacci heap. Although theoretically efficient, Fibonacci heaps are complicated to implement and not as fast in practice as other kinds of heaps. In this paper we describe a new form of heap, called the pairing heap, intended to be competitive with the Fibonacci heap in theory and easy to implement and fast in practice. We provide a partial complexity analysis of pairing heaps. Complete analysis remains an open problem.