I’ve been thinking about writing an essay about the beauty & weirdness of cryptographic hash functions. The way any digitized data, however huge, can be named by a short fixed-size binary string. The way there are in theory an infinite number of hash collisions, but in practice zero. I was talking to myself about it, this morning, and two quotes appeared, which I write down here to remember:
“Hashing is my favorite computer-science concept.”
and
“SHA is the Dewey Decimal code of Borges’s Universal Library.”
(except that there’s a fallacy in the second statement, which I leave as an exercise for the reader.)