from another list I sit on:-

>> Subject: Re: Good Text Hash Algorithm
>> 
>> Robert Woodhead <trebor at animeigo.com> asks:
>> > I'm looking for a good, fast and simple algorithm that can hash a 
>> > string of arbitrary length (in practice, a line of text or less) down 
>> > to a 4 byte integer with minimum collision probability.
>> 
>> Bob Jenkins (http://burtleburtle.net/bob/hash/index.html)
>> has hash functions that are very fast and that come with
>> guarantees as good as you're likely to get about collision
>> probability.


Possibly interesting for those of you with keen interest in the matter.

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.  - Hamming