The original motivation for the creation of Bloom filters is efficient set membership, using a probabilistic approach to significantly reduce the time and space required to reject items that are not members in a certain set. The data structure was proposed by Burton Bloom in a 1970 paper titled "Space/Time Trade-offs in Hash Coding with Allowable Errors". It's a good paper that's worth reading. Suppose that we store some information on disk and want to check if a certain file contains a certain ...