Chaining

Separate chaining is a popular and straightforward method for resolving collisions in a hash table. The idea is to have each entry in the hash table array act as the head of a linked list. All keys that hash to the same index are stored in the linked list at that index. Let's walk through the operations. **Insertion**: To insert a key-value pair, you first compute the hash of the key to get the array index. You then traverse the linked list at that index. If the key already exists in the list, you update its value. If it doesn't, you add a new node with the key-value pair to the end (or beginning) of the list. **Search**: To find the value for a given key, you compute its hash to find the correct list, and then perform a simple linear search on that list to find the node with the matching key. **Deletion**: Deletion involves hashing the key, finding the correct list, searching for the key within that list, and then performing a standard linked list node removal. The performance of a chained hash table is determined by its load factor (α = number of elements / table size), which represents the average length of a chain. Search time is O(1 + α). To keep performance high, if the load factor gets too large, the table should be resized (rehashed) to a larger size.