What is the best 32bit hash function for relatively short strings?
Strings are tag names that consist of English letters, numbers, spaces and some additional characters (#, $, ., ...). For example: Unit testing, C# 2.0.
I am looking for 'best' as in 'minimal collisions', performance is not important for my goals.
If performance isn't important, simply take a secure hash such as MD5 or SHA1, and truncate its output to 32 bits. This will give you a distribution of hash codes that's indistinguishable from random.