How does a hash table work?

Question

I\'m looking for an explanation of how a hash table works - in plain English for a simpleton like me!

For example, I know it takes the key, calculates the hash (I a

Answer 1

Here's another way to look at it.

I assume you understand the concept of an array A. That's something that supports the operation of indexing, where you can get to the Ith element, A[I], in one step, no matter how large A is.

So, for example, if you want to store information about a group of people who all happen to have different ages, a simple way would be to have an array that is large enough, and use each person's age as an index into the array. Thay way, you could have one-step access to any person's information.

But of course there could be more than one person with the same age, so what you put in the array at each entry is a list of all the people who have that age. So you can get to an individual person's information in one step plus a little bit of search in that list (called a "bucket"). It only slows down if there are so many people that the buckets get big. Then you need a larger array, and some other way to get more identifying information about the person, like the first few letters of their surname, instead of using age.

That's the basic idea. Instead of using age, any function of the person that produces a good spread of values can be used. That's the hash function. Like you could take every third bit of the ASCII representation of the person's name, scrambled in some order. All that matters is that you don't want too many people to hash to the same bucket, because the speed depends on the buckets remaining small.