Can’t the steps be reversed one by one to get back the original?
In: Mathematics
An analogy or two.
Your original data is like the raw ingredients for a cake.
You use a recipe (algorithm) and an oven (computer) to process the ingredients and bake a cake.
It’s not possible to un-bake a cake and get back the ingredients.
We ensure that the recipe (hashing algo) works in such a way that if the ingredients (data) are even the slightest bit different, the resulting cake is very different.
Thus if we find two identical cakes, we know they had to have identical ingredients and use the same recipe. I.e. Two output hashes had to have the same input data and algo.
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