Cuckoo hashing

Cuckoo hashing is a scheme in computer programming for resolving hash collisions of values of hash functions in a table, with worst-case constant lookup time. The name derives from the behavior of some species of cuckoo, where the cuckoo chick pushes the other eggs or young out of the nest when it hatches; analogously, inserting a new key into a cuckoo hashing table may push an older key to a different location in the table.

Cuckoo hashing was first described by Rasmus Pagh and Flemming Friche Rodler in 2001.

Cuckoo hashing is a form of open addressing in which each non-empty cell of a hash table contains a key or key–value pair. A hash function is used to determine the location for each key, and its presence in the table (or the value associated with it) can be found by examining that cell of the table. However, open addressing suffers from collisions, which happen when more than one key is mapped to the same cell. The basic idea of cuckoo hashing is to resolve collisions by using two hash functions instead of only one. This provides two possible locations in the hash table for each key. In one of the commonly used variants of the algorithm, the hash table is split into two smaller tables of equal size, and each hash function provides an index into one of these two tables. It is also possible for both hash functions to provide indexes into a single table.

Lookup requires inspection of just two locations in the hash table, which takes constant time in the worst case (see Big O notation). This is in contrast to many other hash table algorithms, which may not have a constant worst-case bound on the time to do a lookup. Deletions, also, may be performed by blanking the cell containing a key, in constant worst case time, more simply than some other schemes such as linear probing.

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