# Modulo a Large Prime: Why?

The Karp-Rabin algorithm for string matching (which is pretty elegant, and I strongly prefer it to KMP in most settings), uses the modulo operator when computing the hash of the strings. What is interesting is, it recommends using a prime number as the modulus for doing this.

Similarly, when computing which hash-table bucket a particular item goes to, the common way to do it is: $b = h(x)\bmod n$. Where $h(x)$ is the hash function output, $n$ is the number of buckets you have.

## Why do we need a prime modulus?

In hash functions, one should expect to receive pathological inputs. Assume, $n = 8$. What happens, if we receive $h(x)$ such as that they are all multiples of $4$? That is, $h(x)$ is in $[4, 8, 12, 16, 20, …]$, which in $\bmod 8$ arithmetic will be $[4, 0, 4, 0, 4, …]$. Clearly, only 2 buckets will be used, and the rest 6 buckets will be empty, if the input follows this pattern. There are several such examples.

As a generalization, if the greatest common factor of $h(x)$ and $n$ is $g$, and the input is going to be of the form $[h(x), 2h(x), 3h(x), …]$, then the number of buckets that will be used is $\large \frac{n}{g}$. This is easily workable on paper.

We ideally want to be able to use all the buckets. Hence, the number of buckets used, $\large \frac{n}{g}$ $= n$, which implies $g = 1$.

This means, the input and the modulus ($n$) should be co-prime (i.e., share no common factors). Given, we can’t change the input, we can only change the modulus. So we should choose the modulus such that it is co-prime to the input.

For the co-prime requirement to hold for all inputs, $n$ has to be a prime. Now it will have no common factors with any input (except it’s own multiples), and $g$ would be 1.

Therefore, we need the modulus to be prime in such settings.

Let me know if I missed out on something, or my intuition here is incorrect.