tags:

views:

18

answers:

0

I read a paper that explained that using CRCs generated from the CRC-64-ISO algorithm as hash keys is likely to result in collisions for large sets of data. Postmodern's Ruby CRC project is pretty interesting, but the CRC64 class seems to be using the CRC-64-ISO algorithm.

I'm hoping to generate probably-unique ids from canonical input that are stable and somewhat human-friendly, e.g., that would be easy to use in a spreadsheet being maintained by hand. I would just use SHA1s, but they're pretty long.

I'm only familiar with the basics of hash keys, and I barely caught CRC-64-ISO issue and don't feel competent at this point to put together a class with better hashing characteristics. Is there an existing ruby library that has something that can be used here?