Penguin
Annotated edit history of Hash version 1 showing authors affecting page license. View with all changes included.
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1 WikiAdmin 1
2 A Hash is a number which represents a document in some way. For instance, adding up the value of all the charactors would be a simple hash. Usually you want the hash to have a reasonably small number of possible values, so you modulo it some number, say 256. You also want a hash to be reasonably distributed in that range. My example hash kinda fails on all these counts :)
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4 Hashes are useful for looking up documents. This is called a HashTable. Someone wanna explain this? I tried and did an abysmal job.
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6 Hashes are also used in security, they are called CryptographicHash's