Lecture 10 — March 20 , 2012

In the last lecture, we finished up talking about memory hierarchies and linked cache-oblivious data structures with geometric data structures. In this lecture we talk about different approaches to hashing. First, we talk about different hash functions and their properties, from basic universality to k-wise independence to a simple but effective hash function called simple tabulation. Then, we talk about different approaches to using these hash functions in a data structure. The approaches we cover are basic chaining, perfect hashing, linear probing, and cuckoo hashing. The goal of hashing is to provide a solution that is faster than binary trees. We want to be able to store our information in less than O(u lg u) space and perform operations in less than O(lg u) time. In particular, FKS hashing achieves O(1) worst-case query time with O(n) expected space and takes O(n) construction time for the static dictionary problem. Cuckoo Hashing achieves O(n) space, O(1) worst-case query and deletion time, and O(1) amortized insertion time for the dynamic dictionary problem.