Soft heap: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

In computer science, the soft heap is a data structure and a variant on the simple heap designed by Bernard Chazelle in 2000. By carefully "corrupting" a certain small percentage of values in the heap, it is able to achieve amortized constant-time bounds for all operations. A bound can be set on the percentage of values which are corrupted, but the lower this is set, the more time insertions require.