- Hashing is simply the act of turning a data chunk of arbitrary length into a fixed-width value (hereinafter called a hash value) that can be used to represent that chunk in situations where dealing with the original data chunk would be inconvenient.
- A hash table is one of those situations; it simply stores references to such data chunks in a table indexed by each chunk’s hash value. This way, instead of potentially comparing your desired key chunk against a huge number of chunks, you simply compute the hash value of the key chunk and do a much faster lookup with that hash value.
VietMX Staff asked 3 years ago
