So what if I told you that for the very common case of a pointer sized key lookup that the standard assumptions are wrong? What if there was an algorithm which provides nearly all the advantages of ordered indexation such as closest fit finds, except it has nearly O(1) complexity rather than O(log N) and is therefore 100% faster? What if, in fact, this algorithm is a good 20% faster than the typical O(1) hash table implementation for medium sized collections and is no slower even at 10,000 items?