Fundamentally, it never will be able to do this. The reason is because a hash is a galois field, or finite field which has no unique solutions. Turning a file

Fundamentally, it never will be able to do this. The reason is because a hash is a galois field, or finite field which has no unique solutions. Turning a file into a string is simple, and only has one correct answer in that direction. Turning a string into the same file mentioend previously is impossible, because there are multiple correct answers given any string, and the context had been discarded. There is no determinable way to rebuild the context, its a guess. In one direction you have a unique answer, in the other you have a many to one answer. Determinism which is the property needed by computers to do work requires that there be a 1:1 solution otherwise you run into issues with the halting problem, and other non-deterministic behaviors that don't lend themselves to anything useful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_computation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_computation Fundamentally if determinism is not present, a turing machine can't solve those classes of problems. Its a fundamental in the theory of computation. Yet so many people subscribe to magical thinking about computers because they do not understand this. If you could preserve the context for a single file, then you could get the same file back, but special handling would be needed to switch between conflicts with determinism (which isn't possible for turing machines, halting problem) and for a general solution you would have to save the context of every single possible file (an infinite solution requiring an infinite amount of memory). It can attempt to make an approximation, but that approximation in functions like hashes is so chaotic it will never get close to a general approximation. It must get infinitely close, and as it works the memory required grows up to the size of the unique domain for the output function, at which point you run into the halting problem where determinism breaks. From that point it grows infinitely from there in a non-deterministic way. Given the constraints imposed on the design of current day computers, more likely it will simply only map to the first unique answer within the space despite there being other possible answers because after that it has no way to know when it should halt, nor will it ever. There are limits to the types of problems computers can solve. Edit: clarified language