Fibonacci Hashing: The Optimization That the World Forgot

Don't do this. Use a real hash function that guarantees a highly random distribution, make your hash tables power-of-two sized, and map from hash value to table index using (hash & (size-1)). The fibonacci constant thing will help clean up the distribution of a bad hash function, but it does nothing for collision resistance if the underlying hash function is weak. -Austin, author of Murmurhash and SMHasher

I first learned this trick for generating hues for colors when you don't know how many you'll need. I think LibreOffice might do this. It always picks blue and orange for the first 2 series in a chart. But you can keep picking and it always has more colors that are just slightly different than all the previous ones.

Why the golden ratio? Because the continued fraction of the golden ratio is all 1's [0]. So it is uniquely hard to approximate with a rational number. The golden ratio is the bound on Hurwitz's theorem [1]. And avoiding a rational number is what you want for good hashing, because multiplying with a rational number doesn't mix your digits well. [0] https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/48589/generate-... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurwitz%27s_theorem_(number_...