What is a sensible prime for hashcode calculation?

Question

Eclipse 3.5 has a very nice feature to generate Java hashCode() functions. It would generate for example (slightly shortened:)

class HashTest {
    int i;
    int j;        
    public int hashCode() {
        final int prime = 31;
        int result = prime + i;
        result = prime * result + j;
        return result;
    }
}

(If you have more attributes in the class, result = prime * result + attribute.hashCode(); is repeated for each additional attribute. For ints .hashCode() can be omitted.)

This seems fine but for the choice 31 for the prime. It is probably taken from the hashCode implementation of Java String, which was used for performance reasons that are long gone after the introduction of hardware multipliers. Here you have many hashcode collisions for small values of i and j: for example (0,0) and (-1,31) have the same value. I think that is a Bad Thing(TM), since small values occur often. For String.hashCode you'll also find many short strings with the same hashcode, for instance "Ca" and "DB". If you take a large prime, this problem disappears if you choose the prime right.

So my question: what is a good prime to choose? What criteria do you apply to find it?

This is meant as a general question - so I do not want to give a range for i and j. But I suppose in most applications relatively small values occur more often than large values. (If you have large values the choice of the prime is probably unimportant.) It might not make much of a difference, but a better choice is an easy and obvious way to improve this - so why not do it? Commons lang HashCodeBuilder also suggests curiously small values.

(Clarification: this is not a duplicate of Why does Java's hashCode() in String use 31 as a multiplier? since my question is not concerned with the history of the 31 in the JDK, but on what would be a better value in new code using the same basic template. None of the answers there try to answer that.)

Answer 1

I recommend using 92821. Here's why.

To give a meaningful answer to this you have to know something about the possible values of i and j. The only thing I can think of in general is, that in many cases small values will be more common than large values. (The odds of 15 appearing as a value in your program are much better than, say, 438281923.) So it seems a good idea to make the smallest hashcode collision as large as possible by choosing an appropriate prime. For 31 this rather bad - already for i=-1 and j=31 you have the same hash value as for i=0 and j=0.

Since this is interesting, I've written a little program that searched the whole int range for the best prime in this sense. That is, for each prime I searched for the minimum value of Math.abs(i) + Math.abs(j) over all values of i,j that have the same hashcode as 0,0, and then took the prime where this minimum value is as large as possible.

Drumroll: the best prime in this sense is 486187739 (with the smallest collision being i=-25486, j=67194). Nearly as good and much easier to remember is 92821 with the smallest collision being i=-46272 and j=46016.

If you give "small" another meaning and want to be the minimum of Math.sqrt(i*i+j*j) for the collision as large as possible, the results are a little different: the best would be 1322837333 with i=-6815 and j=70091, but my favourite 92821 (smallest collision -46272,46016) is again almost as good as the best value.

I do acknowledge that it is quite debatable whether these calculation make much sense in practice. But I do think that taking 92821 as prime makes much more sense than 31, unless you have good reasons not to.