Re: Re: Re: Auto-reaping of duplicates

Well I have quite a bit of trouble believing that two posts, with different authors and different names would generate the same MD5. I suppose its possible but I guess the post would have to be very very long indeed. I seriously doubt that its possible to get the same MD5 from different data when the data is small, especially as small as a post would be. But then I dont know the full workings of MD5...

Of course however, the extra check is cheap so why not...

:-)

Yves
--
You are not ready to use symrefs unless you already know why they are bad. -- tadmc (CLPM)

Comment on Re: Re: Re: Auto-reaping of duplicates

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Re (tilly) 4: Auto-reaping of duplicates by tilly (Archbishop) on Oct 24, 2001 at 08:41 UTC
It is possible to get conflicts once there are more than 2128 possible posts, which takes 128 bits. That fits inside of 43 bytes, so it is certainly possible to get two posts that collide. In fact as long as we stay well below 264 posts (order of magnitude), the odds are very good that there are no accidental duplicates at all. It is possible that somewhere there is, but the odds are negligable.	[reply]

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Re (tilly) 4: Auto-reaping of duplicates
by tilly (Archbishop) on Oct 24, 2001 at 08:41 UTC

In fact as long as we stay well below 2**64 posts (order of magnitude), the odds are very good that there are no accidental duplicates at all. It is possible that somewhere there is, but the odds are negligable.

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