Tatiana

[tatsqui]

Hash Table Practice

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Comprehension Questions

Question	Answer
Why is a good Hash Function Important?	Because it will guarantee uniqueness MOST of the time, avoid collisions, and thus provide the functionality of storing data with a quick lookup time for a specific value.
How can you judge if a hash function is good or not?	If the hash function avoids collisions, and uniformly distrubute values, and thus can provide an O(1) lookup time for most use cases, then it is a good hash function.
Is there a perfect hash function? If so what is it?	Nope.
Describe a strategy to handle collisions in a hash table	There is linear probing where if there is a collision, you look to the next bucket to see if it is available or not, and then assign the hash key to that bucket to store the value being mapped. Problem with this approach is that it can cause clustering which means the information isn't uniformly distributed within the underlying datat structure.
Describe a situation where a hash table wouldn't be as useful as a binary search tree	When you are trying to find a maximum or minimum value, or otherwise trying to search based on ordered data. Hash functions don't care about order.
What is one thing that is more clear to you on hash tables now	The heuristic of implementing one is a bit more clear now, although it does still seem like a complicated algorithm to come up with.

[CheezItMan]

Nice work, you hit the learning goals here. Excellent work! Thanks for getting this in.

[CheezItMan]

👍

[CheezItMan]

indentation

[CheezItMan]

where n is the number of distinct elements.

You also should consider that the list might be much longer than the number of distinct elements.

So maybe O(n + k log k) where k is the number of distinct elements and n the number of elements.