Talk:SE250:lab-5:hals016

Comments from John Hamer

• "A sample size of 200 seems fair looking at a scenario of a small company assigning ID's to their employees." — that's not what's happening here. This is the number of times you roll the hashing dice. For a dice with 4 billion sides, 200 rolls doesn't seem like a lot.

Further, a scenario for a small company with 200 employees is hardly a case that we would be concerned about performance. Any data structure will work find with what small numbers.

• "The chi square distribution is only exceeded 25% of the time" — you don't understand chi square, and have made an erroneous assumption. Beware! You need to get better at knowing when you don't know something.

• You'd be better turning off VERBOSE_OUTPUT, and generating a concise table of results.

• The rand and high_rand functions don't look at the input source, so there's no need to report then separately.

• "Entropy = 0.000000" — zero entropy means the values are all the same. Something is wrong here.

• "based on my judgment" — please explain. You need to expose your reasoning to scrutiny.

Shame you didn't get on to the second part.

My concerns are that you don't seem to appreciate the need to explain your reasoning, and that you are making assumptions about the meaning of data without taking the time to check those assumptions. These are serious flaws that you are going to have to work on.