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Despite being one of the oldest data structures in computer science, hash tables continue to be the focus of a great deal of both theoretical and empirical research. A central reason for this is that many of the fundamental properties that one desires from a hash table are difficult to achieve simultaneously; thus many variants offering different trade-offs have been proposed. This article introduces Iceberg hashing, a hash table that simultaneously offers the strongest known guarantees on a large number of core properties. Iceberg hashing supports constant-time operations while improving on the state of the art for space efficiency, cache efficiency, and low failure probability. Iceberg hashing is also the first hash table to support a load factor of up to1 - o(1)while being stable, meaning that the position where an element is stored only ever changes when resizes occur. In fact, in the setting where keys are Θ (logn) bits, the space guarantees that Iceberg hashing offers, namely that it uses at most\(\log \binom{|U|}{n} + O(n \log \ \text{log} n)\)bits to storenitems from a universeU, matches a lower bound by Demaine et al. that applies to any stable hash table. Iceberg hashing introduces new general-purpose techniques for some of the most basic aspects of hash-table design. Notably, our indirection-free technique for dynamic resizing, which we call waterfall addressing, and our techniques for achieving stability and very-high probability guarantees, can be applied to any hash table that makes use of the front-yard/backyard paradigm for hash table design.
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On the Optimal Time/Space Tradeoff for Hash Tables
For nearly six decades, the central open question in the study of hash tables has been to determine the optimal achievable tradeoff curve between time and space. State-of-the-art hash tables offer the following guarantee: If keys/values are Θ(logn) bits each, then it is possible to achieve constant-time insertions/deletions/queries while wasting only O(loglogn) bits of space per key when compared to the information-theoretic optimum. Even prior to this bound being achieved, the target of O(log log n) wasted bits per key was known to be a natural end goal, and was proven to be optimal for a number of closely related problems (e.g., stable hashing, dynamic retrieval, and dynamically-resized filters). This paper shows that O(log log n) wasted bits per key is not the end of the line for hashing. In fact, for any k ∈ [log∗ n], it is possible to achieve O(k)-time insertions/deletions, O(1)-time queries, and O(log(k) n) = Ologlog···logn k wasted bits per key (all with high probability in n). This means that, each time we increase inser- tion/deletion time by an additive constant, we reduce the wasted bits per key exponentially. We further show that this tradeoff curve is the best achievable by any of a large class of hash tables, including any hash table designed using the current framework for making constant-time hash tables succinct. Our results hold not just for fixed-capacity hash tables, but also for hash tables that are dynamically resized (this is a fundamental departure from what is possible for filters); and for hash tables that store very large keys/values, each of which can be up to no(1) bits (this breaks with the conventional wisdom that larger keys/values should lead to more wasted bits per key). For very small keys/values, we are able to tighten our bounds to o(1) wasted bits per key, even when k = O(1). Building on this, we obtain a constant-time dynamic filter that uses nlogε−1+nloge+o(n) bits of space for a wide choice of
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- PAR ID:
- 10328616
- Date Published:
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- STOC
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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