“…The random access problem is to preprocess a data set into a compressed representation that supports fast retrieval of any part of the data without decompressing the entire data set. The random access problem is a well-studied problem for many types of data and compression schemes [1,3,5,8,9,19,31,35,41,48,53] and random access queries is a basic primitive in several algorithms and data structures on compressed data, see e.g., [7,9,23,24,25] In this paper, we consider the random access problem on collections of strings where each string is the result of an edit operation, i.e., inserting, delete, or replace a single character, from another string in the collection. Specifically, our collection is given by a rooted tree, called a version tree, where edges are labeled by an edit operation and a node represents the string obtained by applying the sequence of edit operation on the path from the root to the node (see Figure 1(a)).…”