  In 1985, Sleator and Tarjan introduced the splay tree, a self-adjusting
binary search tree algorithm. Splay trees were conjectured to perform within a
constant factor as any offline rotation-based search tree algorithm on every
sufficiently long sequence---any binary search tree algorithm that has this
property is said to be dynamically optimal. However, currently neither splay
trees nor any other tree algorithm is known to be dynamically optimal. Here we
survey the progress that has been made in the almost thirty years since the
conjecture was first formulated, and present a binary search tree algorithm
that is dynamically optimal if any binary search tree algorithm is dynamically
optimal.
