Referring to the original problem: Optimizing hand-evaluation algorithm for Poker-Monte-Carlo-Simulation
I have a list of 5 to 7 cards and want to store their value in a hashtable, which should be an array of 32-bit-integers and directly accessed by the hashfunctions value as index. Regarding the large amount of possible combinations in a 52-card-deck, I don't want to waste too much memory.
Numbers:
Storing 157 million 32-bit-integer values costs about 580MB. So I would like to avoid increasing this number by reserving memory in an array for values that aren't needed.
So the question is: How could a hashfunction look like, that maps each possible, non duplicated combination of cards to a consecutive value between 0 and 156.742.040 or at least comes close to it?
Paul Senzee has a great post on this for 7 cards (deleted link as it is broken and now points to a NSFW site).
His code is basically a bunch of pre-computed tables and then one function to look up the array index for a given 7-card hand (represented as a 64-bit number with the lowest 52 bits signifying cards):
inline unsigned index52c7(unsigned __int64 x)
{
const unsigned short *a = (const unsigned short *)&x;
unsigned A = a[3], B = a[2], C = a[1], D = a[0],
bcA = _bitcount[A], bcB = _bitcount[B], bcC = _bitcount[C], bcD = _bitcount[D],
mulA = _choose48x[7 - bcA], mulB = _choose32x[7 - (bcA + bcB)], mulC = _choose16x[bcD];
return _offsets52c[bcA] + _table4[A] * mulA +
_offsets48c[ (bcA << 4) + bcB] + _table [B] * mulB +
_offsets32c[((bcA + bcB) << 4) + bcC] + _table [C] * mulC +
_table [D];
}
In short, it's a bunch of lookups and bitwise operations powered by pre-computed lookup tables based on perfect hashing.
If you go back and look at this website, you can get the perfect hash code that Senzee used to create the 7-card hash and repeat the process for 5- and 6-card tables (essentially creating a new index52c7.h for each). You might be able to smash all 3 into one table, but I haven't tried that.
All told that should be ~628 MB (4 bytes * 157 M entries). Or, if you want to split it up, you can map it to 16-bit numbers (since I believe most poker hand evaluators only need 7,462 unique hand scores) and then have a separate map from those 7,462 hand scores to whatever hand categories you want. That would be 314 MB.