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<title>Rationale</title>
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<div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both">
<a name="hash.rationale"></a><a class="link" href="rationale.html" title="Rationale">Rationale</a>
</h2></div></div></div>
<p>
The rationale can be found in the original design <sup>[<a name="hash.rationale.f0" href="#ftn.hash.rationale.f0" class="footnote">1</a>]</sup>.
</p>
<h4>
<a name="hash.rationale.h0"></a>
<span><a name="hash.rationale.quality_of_the_hash_function"></a></span><a class="link" href="rationale.html#hash.rationale.quality_of_the_hash_function">Quality
of the hash function</a>
</h4>
<p>
Many hash functions strive to have little correlation between the input and
output values. They attempt to uniformally distribute the output values for
very similar inputs. This hash function makes no such attempt. In fact, for
integers, the result of the hash function is often just the input value. So
similar but different input values will often result in similar but different
output values. This means that it is not appropriate as a general hash function.
For example, a hash table may discard bits from the hash function resulting
in likely collisions, or might have poor collision resolution when hash values
are clustered together. In such cases this hash function will preform poorly.
</p>
<p>
But the standard has no such requirement for the hash function, it just requires
that the hashes of two different values are unlikely to collide. Containers
or algorithms designed to work with the standard hash function will have to
be implemented to work well when the hash function's output is correlated to
its input. Since they are paying that cost a higher quality hash function would
be wasteful.
</p>
<p>
For other use cases, if you do need a higher quality hash function, then neither
the standard hash function or <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">boost</span><span class="special">::</span><span class="identifier">hash</span></code> are
appropriate. There are several options available. One is to use a second hash
on the output of this hash function, such as <a href="http://www.concentric.net/~ttwang/tech/inthash.htm" target="_top">Thomas
Wang's hash function</a>. This this may not work as well as a hash algorithm
tailored for the input.
</p>
<p>
For strings that are several fast, high quality hash functions available (for
example <a href="http://code.google.com/p/smhasher/" target="_top">MurmurHash3</a>
and <a href="http://code.google.com/p/cityhash/" target="_top">Google's CityHash</a>),
although they tend to be more machine specific. These may also be appropriate
for hashing a binary representation of your data - providing that all equal
values have an equal representation, which is not always the case (e.g. for
floating point values).
</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<br><hr width="100" align="left">
<div class="footnote"><p><sup>[<a id="ftn.hash.rationale.f0" href="#hash.rationale.f0" class="para">1</a>] </sup>
issue 6.18 of the <a href="http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2005/n1837.pdf" target="_top">Library
Extension Technical Report Issues List</a> (page 63)
</p></div>
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<td align="right"><div class="copyright-footer">Copyright © 2005-2008 Daniel
James<p>
Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying
file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at <a href="http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt" target="_top">http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt</a>)
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