Making fast hash tables in programming, which don't cause collision trouble, is one of computing's holy grails. Facebook thinks it's created a good one.

A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible.

That assumption refers to hash tables, and a conjecture based on work from the 1980s regarding the optimal way to store and query the data in them. The student, formerly of Rutgers University in ...