Kirsten

[kanderson38]

Hash Table Practice

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Comprehension Questions

Question	Answer
Why is a good Hash Function Important?	It reduces collisions and therefore brings the time complexity of accessing values closer to O(n).
How can you judge if a hash function is good or not?	If it's fast, produces only a few collisions, and produces an almost-random distribution of key/value pairs, it's a good hash function.
Is there a perfect hash function? If so what is it?	Nope!
Describe a strategy to handle collisions in a hash table	You can use linear probing, which involves checking each successive bucket in the array (starting from the collision point) and finding the next empty bucket.
Describe a situation where a hash table wouldn't be as useful as a binary search tree	A BST would be more useful if the order of the values were important (you can run an in-order traversal on a BST, but a hash's values are unordered).
What is one thing that is more clear to you on hash tables now	The probing strategies used to avoid collisions.

[CheezItMan]

Nice work, this is pretty well done. Do take a look at my statements on the Big-O of these. Otherwise this is quite well done.

[CheezItMan]

But you're not sorting an array of all the characters in all the strings.

Instead I would say that the time complexity is O(n * m log m), where n is the number of strings and m is the length of the largest string. If you could assume the all the strings were less than a certain number of characters you could then say it's O(n).

[CheezItMan]

I would say instead O(n²) where n is the length of a side of the sudoku table.