Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Hashing Short Strings

Back in 2005 I wrote a small Windows desktop program to plot the distribution of 32-bit integer values generated by the .NET Framework String GetHashCode method. I was curious about how well the hash algorithm behaved, especially for short strings. How widely distributed are the hash values? What are the chances of collisions?

In mid 2014 I resurrected the program, modernised it a bit and added a pick list of 22 different hashing and checksum algorithms to see how their behaviour compared to String GetHashCode. The results were so interesting that I have placed the program's C# Source Code on Bitbucket and I composed the following article to discuss the results in detail:

Hashing Short Strings

The hashing article is buried deep inside my personal web site with one obscure link to it, so I thought it was wise to mentioned in this Blog to boost its publicity. Fellow geeks who like maths, crypto and hashing should enjoy the article.

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