Hi, All. I'm playing around with building some data structures backed by a conventional DHT like Chord or Kademlia. It seems like many of the elements in these structures don't need a semantically useful key. Take a linked list, for instance. I need to be able to do a "get" on the head or tail of the list, but the keys of the interior elements don't need to be exposed to the caller. This suggests that I can use random data for these keys. My question is, what's the best way to generate these keys.
The obvious approach is just to fill the key (say 128 bits) with random data. I think I understand the birthday problem and how to estimate the probability that a collision will occur. An alternative approach that was proposed to me was to use 64 bits of random data and a 64-bit timestamp. Here, we hope that the random number generator is not seeded with the system time. The theory is, the odds of generating 2 identical 64-bit numbers in the same nanosecond is less than the odds of generating 2 128-bit numbers over the lifetime of the system. If this is true, it's not clear to me. Can anybody suggest a way to quantify the likelyhood of collision in the second approach? Thanks, Russ
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