A static optimality transformation with applications to planar point location

In the past ten years, there have been a number of data structures that, given a distribution of planar point location queries, produce a planar point location data structure that is tuned for the provided distribution. These structures all suffer from the requirement that the query distribution be provided in advance. For the problem of point location in a triangulation, a data structure is presented that performs asymptotically as well as these structures, but does not require the distribution to be provided in advance. This result is the 2-d analogue of the jump from the optimum binary search trees of Knuth in 1971 which required that the distribution be provided, to the splay trees of Sleator and Tarjan in 1985 where in the static optimality theorem it was proven that splay trees had the same asymptotic performance of optimum search trees without being provided the probability distribution.