Editing Talk:1193: Externalities

:: While this copy-cattism might be the reason for the proliferation of 420s (which, in India, is slang that, funnily enough, refers to a confidence-trickster) - note that at the beginning of the contest, a lot of different domain names all had 'scores' between 400-500. Now, if I'm not wrong, the hash contains 1024 bits. So you could be off by 1024 in the worst case, and 0 in the best case. But the spread was very narrow. Admittedly, you wouldn't notice the higher numbers, because only the best case scenario has been published, but from the clustering of the different universities (with respect to their scores), as well as the fact that it's taking this long for even ONE clear best score to emerge, seems to suggest that there IS something special about the 400-500 score band. Does anyone have any layman-level information on the statistics of the entropy of the Skein hash function? And the statistics of what error figure for random hash compared to given hash is most frequent? [[Special:Contributions/220.224.246.97|220.224.246.97]] 18:26, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

:: While this copy-cattism might be the reason for the proliferation of 420s (which, in India, is slang that, funnily enough, refers to a confidence-trickster) - note that at the beginning of the contest, a lot of different domain names all had 'scores' between 400-500. Now, if I'm not wrong, the hash contains 1024 bits. So you could be off by 1024 in the worst case, and 0 in the best case. But the spread was very narrow. Admittedly, you wouldn't notice the higher numbers, because only the best case scenario has been published, but from the clustering of the different universities (with respect to their scores), as well as the fact that it's taking this long for even ONE clear best score to emerge, seems to suggest that there IS something special about the 400-500 score band. Does anyone have any layman-level information on the statistics of the entropy of the Skein hash function? And the statistics of what error figure for random hash compared to given hash is most frequent? [[Special:Contributions/220.224.246.97|220.224.246.97]] 18:26, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

:: My test here shows that the 420s is that 420 Bits wrong is about what a single computer can get to within a few hours. So its no wonder that 420s are common for a lot of universities. Its just someone there who is running a little script to break the hash.  

:: My test here shows that the 420s is that 420 Bits wrong is about what a single computer can get to within a few hours. So its no wonder that 420s are common for a lot of universities. Its just someone there who is running a little script to break the hash.