# A Memory and Space Constant Shuffling Algorithm

April 2019 · 5 minute read

Andrew Kensler, a researcher at Pixar, introduced an interesting technique for generating the permutation of an array in his 2013 paper, Correlated Multi-Jittered Sampling.

Firstly, let’s look at the naive way of generating a permutation. You construct an array of elements from $0 \cdots n$, and then you randomly shuffle them. Then, your resulting array (let’s call it A), will have the permuted value for i at A[i].

from random import shuffle
n = 10

permutation = list(range(n))
permutation = shuffle(permutation)


The bright side of this is that it’s really easy to implement and fairly easy to access. You simply subscript the array at whichever number you want to permute and you get the permutation for that number. The downside is that it’s O(n) for space complexity and O(n) for time complexity. At the very least, you need to create an array of n elements, yielding an O(n) space complexity, and then generate the array, which is O(n) time, and then shuffle the array, which is also O(n) with the Fisher-Yates algorithm, which the shuffle method from Python uses.

Kensler’s paper introduces a way to turn this into O(1) for both space and time through some clever hashing techniques. He mentions some prior work in AES which uses hashed permutations, and notes that any hash function that is reversible must be a permutation so long as it remains within a defined domain. Why? Consider that a hash is (ideally) a 1-1 mapping of elements. If we are constrained to a domain, then that means that every element in a domain maps to another element within the domain, and thus we end up with a unique mapping of elements to other elements. Because the domain of the input set and output set are the same, we have a random shuffling of the input set.

In Kensler’s paper, he defines a set of operations that are reversible in any domain that is a power of 2. Most of these are trivially reversible, and don’t forget that shifting a number to the left by one bit simply amounts to multiplying by two, and shifting to the right is the same as dividing by two.

hash ^= constant;
hash *= constant; // if the constant is odd
hash += constant;
hash -= constant;
hash ^= hash >> constant;
hash ^= hash << constant;
hash += hash << constant;
hash -= hash << constant;
hash = (hash << constant) | (hash >> wordsize_constant);


Of course, you may be a little put off by the constraint that the domain must be a power of two, but Kensler shows how we can mitigate that to operate within arbitrary domains using cycle walking. Cycle walking is a technique in cryptography where you basically just repeatedly encrypt information until it falls within an acceptable range. In this case, we can continue applying permutations to a number until it falls within the proper range.

Let’s take a look at the actual permutation function.

/*!
* \brief Permute a number
*
* \param i The number to permute/the index of the permutation vector
* \param l The desired size of the permutation vector
* \param p The seed of the shuffle
*/
unsigned permute(unsigned i, unsigned l, unsigned p) {
unsigned w = l - 1;
w |= w >> 1;
w |= w >> 2;
w |= w >> 4;
w |= w >> 8;
w |= w >> 16;

do {
i ^= p;
i *= 0xe170893d;
i ^= p >> 16;
i ^= (i & w) >> 4;
i ^= p >> 8;
i *= 0x0929eb3f;
i ^= p >> 23;
i ^= (i & w) >> 1;
i *= 1 | p >> 27;
i *= 0x6935fa69;
i ^= (i & w) >> 11;
i *= 0x74dcb303;
i ^= (i & w) >> 2;
i *= 0x9e501cc3;
i ^= (i & w) >> 2;
i *= 0xc860a3df;
i &= w;
i ^= i >> 5;
} while (i >= l);
return (i + p) % l;
}


This was taken from Kensler’s paper, the comments added to explain the function signature are mine.

This looks rather daunting, with a lot of bitwise operations, but remember that the entire thing is comprised of operations we just discussed are being reversible. This means that this is a hash operation that is a permutation, so each number will unique map to another number within the smallest power of two domain that is larger than l.

The body of the function inside of the do-while loop is basically just applying a permuted hash repeatedly until our number is within the domain, which we define with l. p can be more or less treated as a random seed, it lets us apply some arbitrary offset which retaining the uniqueness property of a permutation. It’s fairly self explanatory: apply some offset and modulo it within the domain of $0 \cdots l$, and because the input domain is the same as the output domain, we retain the 1-1 mapping and always get a proper permutation.

You may also be wondering what’s going on with w operations before the for loop. The algorithm takes i and returns the greatest number in the domain that is less than a power of two. The “actual” domains in this case are powers of two, and this operation yields the highest number that falls within that domain. So if we have some number $i$, find the smallest number of two $x$ such that $i \leq x$. The code gives us $x - 1$. We can also explain this in terms of bits. It takes the leftmost bit, and turns all of the bits to the right of the bit to 1. If the number is a power of two, then the leftmost bit is flipped to a 0.

I was curious as to how Kensler actually derived this specific function, so I asked him. He told me that he created a program to measure the avalanching properties of the hash function, and they tried a number of hash functions and picked the one with the best empirical results.

Using this function gives you a very low overhead way to generate particular permutations or shuffles on the fly with O(1) space and time complexity.

See discussion on Reddit