Re:Hans Peter Luhn and the Birth of the Hashing Algorithm
by munificent on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @03:27PM
(#16277251)
The mechanics do matter because it's fundamentally a mechanical device.
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Re:Hans Peter Luhn and the Birth of the Hashing Algorithm
by Sniffnoy on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @05:20PM
(#16278076)
What about it involves thinking of elements as bits and sets as whole numbers? I'm not seeing it. Everything you just described is just a physical representation of sets and operations on sets. I don't see any step where elements are mapped to powers of 2 and added up (unless you for some reason insist on thinking that way of aggregating elements into a set), nor any step where a number is broken into bits (again, unless you for some reason insist on thinking that way of breaking a set into its elements).
Re:Hans Peter Luhn and the Birth of the Hashing Algorithm
by munificent on Thursday February 01, 2018 @12:00PM
(#16283434)
> What about it involves thinking of elements as bits and sets as whole numbers?
I said bitwise arithmetic, not binary numbers. :)
> Everything you just described is just a physical representation of sets and operations on sets.
Sure, and how is the set represented and its operations implemented? In the Oracle, each set is represented by a bitmask with a bit position for each element in the set. Set operations are implemented as bitwise operations on those bitmasks.