Hash function

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A hash function is any well-defined procedure or mathematical function that converts a large, possibly variable-sized amount of data into a small datum, usually a single integer that may serve as an index to an array (cf. associative array). The values returned by a hash function are called hash values, hash codes, hash sums, checksums or simply hashes.

Hash functions are mostly used to speed up table lookup or data comparison tasks—such as finding items in a database, detecting duplicated or similar records in a large file, finding similar stretches in DNA sequences, and so on.

A hash function may map two or more keys to the same hash value. In many applications, it is desirable to minimize the occurrence of such collisions, which means that the hash function must map the keys to the hash values as evenly as possible. Depending on the application, other properties may be required as well. Although the idea was conceived in the 1950s,^[1] the design of good hash functions is still a topic of active research.

Hash functions are related to (and often confused with) checksums, check digits, fingerprints, randomization functions, error correcting codes, and cryptographic hash functions. Although these concepts overlap to some extent, each has its own uses and requirements and is designed and optimised differently. The HashKeeper database maintained by the American National Drug Intelligence Center, for instance, is more aptly described as a catalog of file fingerprints than of hash values.

• 1 Applications
  • 1.1 Hash tables
  • 1.2 Caches
  • 1.3 Bloom filters
  • 1.4 Finding duplicate records
  • 1.5 Finding similar records
  • 1.6 Finding similar substrings
  • 1.7 Geometric hashing
• 2 Properties
  • 2.1 Low cost
  • 2.2 Determinism
  • 2.3 Uniformity
  • 2.4 Variable range
  • 2.5 Variable range with minimal movement (dynamic hash function)
  • 2.6 Data normalization
  • 2.7 Continuity
• 3 Hash function algorithms
  • 3.1 Trivial hash function
  • 3.2 Perfect hashing
  • 3.3 Minimal perfect hashing
  • 3.4 Hashing uniformly distributed data
  • 3.5 Hashing data with other distributions
  • 3.6 Hashing variable-length data
  • 3.7 Special-purpose hash functions
  • 3.8 Rolling hash
  • 3.9 Universal hashing
  • 3.10 Hashing with checksum functions
  • 3.11 Hashing with cryptographic hash functions
• 4 Origins of the term
• 5 List of hash functions
• 6 See also
• 7 References
• 8 External links

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