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Pearson hashing

Pearson Hashing is a way of producing random numbers.

In 1990, Peter K. Pearson published a pseudo-random walk hash algorithm which produced integers from 0 to 255, using a combination of XOR and a 256-entry non-linear permutation table.

Pearson hashing can often be used with a specially selected non-linear permutation table to make a perfect hash function: this combinations is known as perfect Pearson hashing.