[foxhill]

> Most of the time is spent on generating the random string

when i took out string generation, i went from 1.2 GH/s to 1.8GH/s (although, i'm assuming my string generation was much simpler)

> I very quickly realised looking through the entire possibility space in order would be unproductive

you say that, but it's not as unproductive as you might think. assuming the hash function is uniformly distributed (hah), there are 4 billion hash values that could result from a string. if we can check 2 billion a second, we should see a result every few seconds. maybe my search space pruning was particularly bad, because i see on average ~4-10 a minute, and they are usually quite clustered together. this suggests the hash is not uniformly distributed (although a cursory glance at the function should make it obvious to people with a maths background).

anyways, it was good fun to poke around :) cheers for sharing!