The key idea behind any hashing algorithm is to take inputs of any length and turn them into an output of a fixed length. Different problem domains have differ

The key idea behind any hashing algorithm is to take inputs of any length and turn them into an output of a fixed length. Different problem domains have different additional requirements: password hashes want to minimise collisions (multiple inputs hashing to the same output), checksums want to make similar inputs produce wildly different outputs, hashtable/dictionary/map key hashes want to create an even distribution of outputs etc. But the thing common to all hashing algorithms is the output is the same size.