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I have a task of hashing DNA sequences. Let the DNA be long sequences of four amino acids, which we will denote by the letters $A, T, G$ and $C$.

My hash function $h$ take DNA as an input and return the sum of amino acid numbers by some large simple modulus as a hash, and then add it to a hash table with a public key. Why is this hashing implementation bad?

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Because

  1. two sequences with the same acids in different order (e.g. two acids switch places) will have the same hash code;

  2. this will only produce numbers from 0 to your large simple modulus instead of all $2^{32}$ or $2^{64}$ possibilities.

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