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Undergraduate Disproves 40-Year-Old Conjecture, Invents New Kind of Hash Table
A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible.
But in the midst of his tinkering, Krapivin realized that he had invented a new kind of hash table, one that worked faster than expected—taking less time and fewer steps to find specific elements. Researchers have long known that for certain common hash tables, the expected time required to make the worst possible insertion—putting an item into, say, the last remaining open spot—is proportional to x. Farach-Colton and Kuszmaul helped Krapivin show that (log x) 2 is the optimal, unbeatable bound for the popular class of hash tables Yao had written about.
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