That's an interesting thought -- even though all the hash keys are different, there may be many collisions because the number of different characters is small. Does anybody know if perl's hash function is sensitive to collisions on permutations?

For example, will things like "123", "213" and "312" hash far apart? If the character position is completely ignored, those will collide. I'm certain perl is not that bad, but 8 character permutations put a lot of stress on the hash function.