Hash

A hash function is any algorithm or subroutine that maps large data sets, called keys, to smaller data sets. For example, a single integer can serve as an index to an array (cf. associative array). The values returned by a hash function are called hash values, hash codes, hash sums, checksums or simply hashes.

Hash functions are mostly used to accelerate table lookup or data comparison tasks such as finding items in a database, detecting duplicated or similar records in a large file, finding similar stretches in DNA sequences, and so on.

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