ABSTRACT Optmaahty questions are examined m the following information retrieval problem. Given a set S of n keys, store them so that queries of the form, "Is x E S? " can be answered quickly It is shown that m a rather general model including all the commonly used schemes, [lg(n + I)] probes to the table are needed m the worst case, prowded the key space is sufficiently large The effects of smaller key space and arbitrary encoding are also explored

We present a simple dictionary with worst case constant lookup time, equaling the theoretical performance of the classic dynamic perfect hashing scheme of Dietzfelbinger et al. (Dynamic perfect hashing: Upper and lower bounds. SIAM J. Comput., 23(4):738–761, 1994). The space usage is similar to that of binary search trees, i.e., three words per key on average. Besides being conceptually much simpler than previous dynamic dictionaries with worst case constant lookup time, our data structure is interesting in that it does not use perfect hashing, but rather a variant of open addressing where keys can be moved back in their probe sequences. An implementation inspired by our algorithm, but using weaker hash functions, is found to be quite practical. It is competitive with the best known dictionaries having an average case (but no nontrivial worst case) guarantee. Key Words: data structures, dictionaries, information retrieval, searching, hashing, experiments * Partially supported by the Future and Emerging Technologies programme of the EU

We generalize Cuckoo Hashing [23] to d-ary Cuckoo Hashing and show how this yields a simple hash table data structure that stores n elements in (1 + ffl) n memory cells, for any constant ffl ? 0. Assuming uniform hashing, accessing or deleting table entries takes at most d = O(ln ffl ) probes and the expected amortized insertion time is constant. This is the first dictionary that has worst case constant access time and expected constant update time, works with (1 + ffl) n space, and supports satellite information. Experiments indicate that d = 4 choices suffice for ffl 0:03. We also describe variants of the data structure that allow the use of hash functions that can be evaluted in constant time.