Re: Advice on Generating Unique Digits From String

["Craig A. Finseth" <fin at finseth dot com>]

   >    m = NewMemoryBlock(17)
   >    m.CString(0) = md5(s)
   >    return m.UInt16Value(0)

   Hmm, I wouldn't necessarily trust this, since (as you pointed out)  
   you're taking only the first two bytes of a 16-byte hash.  It's  
   probably reasonably unique, but I'd be a bit nervous about it.

Agreed.  I'd XOR (Bitwise.BitXor) the MD5 sum bytes.

The 2^16 limit may still cause problems: running the birthday problem
on 2^16 values will give you a surprizingly small number before there
is a 50/50 chance of a collision.  I haven't done the math, but I
would guess it would be something like 1000 strings at most.

Craig

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