On the silhouette of binary search trees

Abstract

A zero-one sequence describes a path through a rooted directed binary tree T; it also encodes a real number in [0, 1]. We regard the level of the external node of T along the path as a function on the unit interval, the silhouette of T. We investigate the asymptotic behavior of the resulting stochastic processes for sequences of trees that are generated by the binary search tree algorithm.