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The probability of a hash collision (2022)

Exploring the math behind hash collisions.

<< previousnext >> A hash function takes arbitrarily complex input - a word, a website, an image, a human being - and maps it to a single number. What you can do instead is apply a hash function to the title of the book (probably The Notebook, knowing you), which will spit out a number, iii. The final approximation suggested by Preshing is that k(k−1)k(k-1)k(k−1) starts to look an awful lot like k2k^2k2 as kkk gets bigger (see Appendix A), so the formula can be written simply as

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