Frank de Groot wrote:
No, that will work just fine for an editor. The "issue" is about hash collision avoidance. When you start thinking ahead (or when you have a huge pattern database), you will need millions of hashes and you'll get collisions even with 64-bit hashing if you have not "taken care of the issue :)". I have never heard of a hashing class in any programming language, neither of any literary source that satisfactorily solves this "issue" best. The very rare sources that hint at a really good solution are incomplete and in fact even lead astray.
Most programmers conveniently ignore the issue. And they might as well. Even if they store 2^24 positions in a hashtable, and do a search of 2^24 positions, the collision probability is at most 2^(24+24-64) = 1/65536, which can be considered negligable. They will start thinking about the issue in 10 years when they store 2^30 positions and search 2^30, bumping the collision probability to 1/16. At that time, moving to 96-bit hashes seems the easy solution... regards, -John _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/