Theory and Practice of Time-space Trade-offs in Memory Limited Search

We establish $O(n \log n)$ minimum-space algorithms that omit both the open and the closed list to determine the shortest path between every two nodes and study the gap in between full memorization in a hash table and the information-theoretic lower bound. The proposed structure of suffix-lists elaborates on a concise binary representation of states by applying bit-state hashing techniques. Significantly more states can be stored while searching and inserting $n$ items into suffix lists is still available in $O(n \log n)$ time. Bit-state hashing leads to the new paradigm of partial iterative-deepening heuristic search, in which full exploration is sacrificed for a better detection of duplicates in large search depth. We give first promising results in the application area of communication protocols