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Re: A short meditation about hash search performance

by Anonymous Monk
on Nov 15, 2003 at 21:58 UTC ( [id://307389]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to A short meditation about hash search performance

The epected or average search time is O(1) under reasonable assumptions, the worst case is O(n) for the fully degenerate case. Insertion and deletion can be done in O(1) worst case time. Most people just state that basic hash operations can be done in O(1) average time.

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Re: A short meditation about hash search performance
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Nov 16, 2003 at 02:58 UTC
    Well, if you can't do queries in O(1) time, you can't do deletes in O(1) time (because to delete something, you first need to find it), and you can only do inserts in O(1) if you accept duplicates - which Perl hashes don't.

    Abigail

      Perhaps I need to re-review the analysis of CLR-1990*, because they clearly state on page 223:
      The worst-case running time for insertion is O(1). For searching, the worst-case running time is proportional to the length of the list: we shall analyze this more closely below. Deletion of an element x can be accomplished in O(1) time if the lists are doubly linked.

      Note, I wasn't referring to perl's hashes in particular, just hashes in general.

      * Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest 1990: Introduction to Algorithms. MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts.

        If you read page 223 carefully, you see that the arguments to the function Chained-Hash-Delete are (T, x) and not (T, k). Now x is here the node to be deleted. That is, you have already found the node with key k to be deleted. So, yes, for a double linked list, the actual deletion is in constant time, but that does not include the time to search for the node to be deleted.

        Abigail

        Deletion of an element x can be accomplished in O(1) time if the lists are doubly linked.

        It still means you need to find an object before you can delete it.

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