A skip list of 26 keys, p = 0.5, seed 20260810

A skip list of 26 keys, p = 0.5, seed 20260810

Each key sits at a rank along the bottom lane; a key promoted by the coins appears again on every lane up to its height. The heavy arrows are the search for key 21, drawn from the same run that counted it: 8 comparisons and 3 forward hops across 5 levels. Nothing about the keys decided which of them are tall. The heights were drawn from 57 coin flips before a single comparison was made, and the same seed on a shuffled insertion order gives the same silhouette.

Drawn at 700 × 262, wide on the page. Everything above is what skiplist-shape returns with no arguments; the caption is the generator's own, computed from the numbers in the drawing rather than written beside it.

2 essays call skiplist-shape. The drawing above is what it returns with no arguments at all; every call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the one its essay argues about — which is what optcheck and figfill exist to catch.