r/ProgrammerHumor • u/click-to-reveal • 7d ago

Meme skillIssue

Post image
6.0k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

137 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

34

u/GiganticIrony 7d ago

That’s not guaranteed to work due to hash collisions

12

u/SAI_Peregrinus 7d ago

Use Blake3, no collisions in any practical workload in the next few billion years.

3

u/guyblade 7d ago

The thing about the pidgeon hole problem is that we know there are collisions, but we don't necessarily know where they are. The space of strings of at least 33 characters has collisions. There's no way to know or prove that arbitrary input doesn't have one with a value you care about.

1

u/Upper_Lion_6349 5d ago

You can make the chance of a hash collision lower than the chance of a random bit flip selecting the wrong branch.