TL;DR
The Birthday Paradox in Hash Collisions: A canonical quantitative trading interview question at foundation difficulty. Commonly asked at Jane Street, Two Sigma, HRT.
By Valenke Exam Prep Team·Last updated 2026-06-01
foundationProbabilistic Algorithm Analysis
The Birthday Paradox in Hash Collisions
Asked at: Jane Street, Two Sigma, HRT
Problem
A hash function maps inputs to one of buckets uniformly at random. After hashing distinct inputs, what is the expected number of collisions? Specifically, find the smallest (in terms of ) such that the probability of at least one collision exceeds .
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