Yeah, I was careless on not preserving the nice feature of your code that kept there from ever being a match, figuring that the chances were low of a hit; but o

Yeah, I was careless on not preserving the nice feature of your code that kept there from ever being a match, figuring that the chances were low of a hit; but of course that assumption went out the window when the array got way bigger. After posting, I noticed the issue, so I made a similar change to yours, and the results didn't change. I do suggest that you change the line that sets 'key' to not make it known at compile-time, to avoid unrealistic optimizations, thus: const int key = random() | 0x80000000; // ensure no match