Let Abstract be an abstract class, and A1,A2,...,An concrete classes that inherit from Abstact. Each one of Ai has a list of Abstract and a pre-defined, known at compile time, set of primitive types, let’s assume we have a hush function for them, and there are no ‘loops’ in the structure of each concrete element.
Two elements e1 and e2 are identical if they have the same values for the predefined primitives, and if for each Abstract in e1, there exists an Abstract in e2 such that e1 and e2 are identical. (in other words, order is not important).
I am looking for a good hash heuristic for this kind of problem. It shouldn’t (and as far as I know, can’t be) a perfect hash function, but it should be good and easy to compute at run time.
I’ll be glad if someone can give me some guidelines how to implement such a function, or direct me to an article that addresses this problem.
PS I am writing in Java, and I assume (correct me if I am wrong) the built in hash() won’t be good enough for this problem.
EDIT :
the lists and primitives are fixed after construction, but are unknown at compile time.
Use Google Guava’s utilities… Objects.hashCode() is great. Also, the source is available, and they have solved the problem you state, so you can take a look at their solution.