A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sometime in the fall of 2021, Andrew Krapivin, an undergraduate at Rutgers University, encountered a paper that would change his life.

That assumption refers to hash tables, and a conjecture based on work from the 1980s regarding the optimal way to store and query the data in them. The student, formerly of Rutgers University in ...

Bloom filters are an essential class of probabilistic data structures designed for rapid set membership testing while minimising memory usage. By utilising multiple hash functions, these ...