Quadratic probing

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Quadratic probing is a scheme in computer programming for resolving collisions in hash tables.

Quadratic probing operates by taking the original hash value and adding successive values of an arbitrary quadratic polynomial to the starting value. This algorithm is used in open-addressed hash tables. Quadratic probing provides good memory caching because it preserves some locality of reference; however, linear probing has greater locality and, thus, better cache performance. Quadratic probing better avoids the clustering problem that can occur with linear probing, although it is not immune.

Quadratic probing is used in the Berkeley Fast File System to allocate free blocks. The allocation routine chooses a new cylinder-group when the current is nearly full using quadratic probing, because of the speed it shows in finding unused cylinder-groups.

[edit] Quadratic Probing Algorithm

Let $h (k)$ be a hash function that maps an element $k$ to an integer in $[0, m - 1]$ , where $m$ is the size of the table.

Let the $i$ ^th probe position for a value $k$ be given by the function $h (k, i) = h (k) + c 1 i + c 2 i 2 (mod m)$ , where $c_2 \neq 0$ . If $c 2 = 0$ , then $h (k, i)$ degrades to a linear probe. For a given hash table, the values of $c 1$ and $c 2$ remain constant.

Example: If $h (k, i) = h (k) + i + i 2 (mod m)$ , then the probe sequence will be $h (k), h (k) + 2, h (k) + 6,...$

For $m = 2 n$ , a good choice for the constants are $c 1 = c 2 =$ 1/2, as the values $h (k, i)$ for $i$ in $[0, m - 1]$ are all distinct. This leads to a probe sequence of $h (k), h (k) + 1, h (k) + 3, h (k) + 6,...$ where the values increase by $1,2,3,...$ .

For prime $m > 2$ , most choices of $c 1$ and $c 2$ will make $h (k, i)$ distinct for $i$ in $[0,(m - 1) / 2]$ . Such choices include $c 1 = c 2 =$ 1/2, $c 1 = c 2 =$ 1, and $c 1 = 0, c 2 = 1$ . Because there are only about m/2 distinct probes for a given element, it is difficult to guarantee that insertions will succeed when the load factor is > 1/2.