I am interested in implementing a priority queue to enable an efficient Astar implementation that is also relatively simple (the priority queue is simple I mean).
It seems that because a Skip List offers a simple O(1) extract-Min operation and an insert operation that is O(Log N) it may be competitive with the more difficult to implement Fibonacci Heap which has O(log N) extract-Min and an O(1) insert. I suppose that the Skip-List would be better for a graph with sparse nodes whereas a Fibonacci heap would be better for an environment with more densely connected nodes.
This would probably make the Fibonacci Heap usually better, but am I correct in assuming that Big-Oh wise these would be similar?
The raison d’etre of the Fibonacci heap is the O(1) decrease-key operation, enabling Dijkstra’s algorithm to run in time O(|V| log |V| + |E|). In practice, however, if I needed an efficient decrease-key operation, I’d use a pairing heap, since the Fibonacci heap has awful constants. If your keys are small integers, it may be even better just to use bins.