Are two Java objects with same hashcodes not necessarily equal?

Question

I understand why providing same hashcode for two equal (through equals) objects is important. But is the vice versa true as well, if two objects have same hash

Answer 1

According to the Javadoc in: http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/Object.html#hashCode%28%29

It is not required that if two objects are unequal according to the equals(java.lang.Object) method, then calling the hashCode method on each of the two objects must produce distinct integer results. However, the programmer should be aware that producing distinct integer results for unequal objects may improve the performance of hashtables.

Edit: In the real world two Strings may have the same hash code. For instance, if you want to store all string combinations that contain lowercase English letters (like "aaaaaaaaaa","aaaaaaaaab" and so on) of length 10, you can't assign a unique hash code to each of the 141.167.095.653.376 combinations, since int in Java is 32-bit and, therefore, can have up to 4.294.967.296 distinct values.