On Apr 12, 2010, at 9:44 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
On Apr 12, 2010, at 8:15 PM, Timothy Hatcher wrote:
Only the first 5-7 characters are needed to identify a single
commit (enough of the hash prefix to be unique). So REGRESSION
(96c3b0) vs REGRESSION(r12345).
How long will 7 characters last before you hit the birthday paradox?
And to answer my own question (because I'm a nerd), a 7 hex digit hash
prefix has a 50% chance of at least one pair of revisions colliding
when there are at least 19290 revs. So we're already past the birthday
paradox threshold to be using only 7 digits (assuming the hashes are
uniformly distributed).
This answer brought to you by Wikipedia and Wolfram|Alpha, favorites
of pedantic nerds everywhere:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem#Cast_as_a_collision_problem
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sqrt%282*2%5E%284*7%29*ln%281%2F%281-.5%29%29%29
Regards,
Maciej
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