Pipe (instrument) Pipe (instrument) A pipe is a tubular wind instrument in general, or various specific wind instruments. The word is an onomatopoeia, and comes from the tone which can resemble that of a bird chirping. Fipple flutes are found in many cultures around the world. Often with six holes, the shepherd's pipe is a common pastoral image. Shepherds often piped both to soothe the sheep and to amuse themselves. Modern manufactured six-hole folk pipes are referred to as pennywhistle or tin whistle. The recorder is a form of pipe, often used as a rudimentary instructional musical instrument at schools, but so
Finger search in rank. If "x" and "y" are the "i"th and "j"th largest elements in the structure, then the difference in rank is |"i" - "j"|. If a normal search in some structure would normally take O(f("n")) time, then a finger search for "x" with finger "y" should ideally take O(f("d")) time. Remark that since "d" ≤ "n", it follows that in the worst case, finger search is only as bad as normal search. However, in practice these degenerate finger searches do more work than normal searches. For instance, if f("n") is log("n"), and finger search does twice as many comparisons