[dastbe]

Rainbow tables are actually a slight revision on this, because the merging of paths is a bad thing as it leads to false positives. Specifically, I can detect that my hash eventually leads to the end of a chain, but it may very well be that it merged into that chain at some point and so not contained in my table.

Rainbow tables minimize the chance of merges by using a sequence of unhash functions in chains so a merge can only occur if it happens the same point in the sequence of unhash functions.