Question

I need a good pseudo random number based on a key consisting of a string and a long. I should get the same random number when I query using the same key and also, I should get a very different number if I query using a slightly different key, even when say the long in the key is off by 1. I tried this code and the random numbers are unique but for similar numbers they seem correlated.

import java.util.Date;
import java.util.Random;
import org.apache.commons.lang3.builder.HashCodeBuilder;

public class HashKeyTest {
    long time;
    String str;
    public HashKeyTest(String str, long time) {
        this.time = time;
        this.str = str;
    }

    @Override
    public int hashCode() {
        return new HashCodeBuilder().append(time).append(str).toHashCode();
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        for(int i=0; i<10; i++){
            long time = new Date().getTime();
            HashKeyTest hk = new HashKeyTest("SPY", time);
            long hashCode = (long)hk.hashCode();
            Random rGen = new Random(hashCode);
            System.out.format("%d:%d:%10.12f\n", time, hashCode, rGen.nextDouble());
            Thread.sleep(1);
        }
    }
}

Solution I pieced together. This works pretty well, but I wonder if it needs to be this verbose.

import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.ObjectOutputStream;
import java.io.Serializable;
import java.nio.ByteBuffer;
import java.security.MessageDigest;
import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;
import java.util.Random;

public class HashKeyTest implements Serializable{

    long time;
    String str;

    public HashKeyTest(String str, long time) {
        this.time = time;
        this.str = str;
    }

    public double random() throws IOException, NoSuchAlgorithmException {
        ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        ObjectOutputStream out = new ObjectOutputStream(bos);
        out.writeObject(this);
        byte[] bytes = bos.toByteArray();
        MessageDigest md5Digest = MessageDigest.getInstance("MD5");
        byte[] hash = md5Digest.digest(bytes);
        ByteBuffer bb = ByteBuffer.wrap(hash);
        long seed = bb.getLong();

        return new Random(seed).nextDouble();
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        long time = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
            time += 250L;
            HashKeyTest hk = new HashKeyTest("SPY", time);
            System.out.format("%d:%10.12f\n", time, hk.random());
            Thread.sleep(1);
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

You said “I should get the same random number when I query using the same key and also, I should get a very different number if I query using a slightly different key”. If I understand your question correctly, you do not want a random number, but rather something like a cryptographic hash code.

You should look at passing whatever data you have through a hash function like SHA or MD5. This will give you something that is seemingly random with respect to the input, but will always be the same given the same input, and will vary wildly even if your input vary only very little.

EDIT:
To consistently obtain double values try something like this (pseudo-code):

SHAHashValue v = ComputeSHA( yourObject);
Random r = new Random(v);
the_random_value = r.getNext();

The idea here is to use the SHA hash value as the seed to initialize your random generator. This is pretty much what you have, but I don’t know what your HashBuilder produces in terms of different values. So using SHA hashes instead might improve the situation.

You should also consider that “very different” values for doubles between 0 and 1 might not be immediately apparent.