Question

A police department wants to maintain a database of up to 1800 license-plate numbers of people who receive frequent tickets so that it can be determined very quickly whether or not a given license plate is in the database. Speed of response is very important; efficient use of memory is also important, but not as important as speed of response. Which of the following data structures would be most appropriate for this task?
a. a sorted linked list
b. a sorted array with 1,800 entries
c. a hash table using open addressing with 1,800 entries
d. a hash table using open addressing with 3,600 entries
e. a hash table using open addressing with 10,000 entries

Answer 1

Answer:

c.

Explanation:

I believe that in this scenario, the best option for this data would be a hash table using open addressing with 1,800 entries. Hash tables consume more memory than lists but it makes up for it with much faster response time speeds. This is because hash tables work on a key:value system therefore, the license plate can easily be grabbed from the database extremely quickly by just plugging in the plate number. Doing so will retrieve all of the saved information from that license plate. That is why hash tables have a constant time complexity of O(1)