in reply to RE: RE: RE: Randomizing Unique ID?
in thread Randomizing Unique ID?

Good point regarding the deterministic sequence by using rand. In that case, bump the number of characters up to 16, or even 32 (which I've seen in a few URLs). Should be much better odds then (it's too early to actually calculate them now :)

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RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Randomizing Unique ID?
by tye (Sage) on Aug 10, 2000 at 17:33 UTC

    No, the number of characters doesn't matter (after a certain point). You could generate 200,000 characters and that wouldn't be any more random or less predictable than if you generated 100 characters because you only have (at most) 2^32 possible seed values and each seed value will produce the exact same sequence, no matter how long you make it.

    Update: To be more precise, if selecting from a set of 64 characters, then using 6 characters gives you 2^36 possible strings. So using more than 6 characters is useless if you have only 2^32 possible seed values.

            - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")