  List Accessing Problem is a well studied research problem in the context of
linear search. Input to the list accessing problem is an unsorted linear list
of distinct elements along with a sequence of requests, where each request is
an access operation on an element of the list. A list accessing algorithm
reorganizes the list while processing a request sequence on the list in order
to minimize the access cost. Move-To-Front algorithm has been proved to be the
best performing list accessing online algorithm till date in the literature.
Characterization of the input request sequences corresponding to practical real
life situations is a big challenge for the list accessing problem. As far as
our knowledge is concerned, no characterization for the request sequences has
been done in the literature till date for the list accessing problem. In this
paper, we have characterized the request sequences for the list accessing
problem based on several factors such as size of the list, size of the request
sequence, ordering of elements and frequency of occurrence of elements in the
request sequence. We have made a comprehensive study of MTF list accessing
algorithm and obtained new theoretical results for our characterized special
class of request sequences. Our characterization will open up a new direction
of research for empirical analysis of list accessing algorithms for real life
inputs.
