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Hash Table Practice

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Comprehension Questions

Question	Answer
Why is a good Hash Function Important?	A hash table is essentially a dictionary, and implementing a good hash function enables faster look-up by minimizing the number of collisions and handling them appropriately.
How can you judge if a hash function is good or not?	The hashing function must be consistent, should (mostly) map different keys to different values, should execute in constant time, and should appear to be random.
Is there a perfect hash function? If so what is it?	No, because they can all cause collisions.
Describe a strategy to handle collisions in a hash table	Chaining: makes each bucket of the hash table's internal array the head of a linked list.
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Describe a situation where a hash table wouldn't be as useful as a binary search tree	When elements need to be sorted.
What is one thing that is more clear to you on hash tables now	How they are stored in memory.

[CheezItMan]

Overall well done, see my minor comments. You hit all the learning goals here. Nice work.

[CheezItMan]

This works but your time complexity is O(n * m log m) where n is the number of strings and m is the length of the strings since you are sorting.

If the strings are guaranteed to be within a certain length, you could drop the m term and it would be O(n).

[CheezItMan]

.key searches the values array for a matching value and returns it's key. So .key is O(n) (not to mention that .max is also O(n).

[CheezItMan]

Correct, although I would have put time complexity as O(nk) instead of O(nm).