Human Generation of Random Quantities
Humans generally do poorly at generating random quantities. Magicians, professional gamblers and con artists depend on the predictability of human behavior. In World War II German code clerks were instructed to select three letters at random to be the initial rotor setting for each Enigma machine message. Instead some chose predictable values like their own or a girlfriend's initials, greatly aiding allied breaking of these encryption systems. Another example is the often predictable ways computer users choose passwords. (See Password cracking.)
Nevertheless, in the specific case of playing mixed strategy games, use of human gameplay entropy for randomness generation was studied by Ran Halprin and Moni Naor."Games for Extracting Randomness". http://www.neko.co.il/MAE-offline.html.
Read more about this topic: Random Number Generator Attack
Famous quotes containing the words human, generation, random and/or quantities:
“There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)
“poor Felix Randal;
How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great gray drayhorse his bright and battering
sandal!”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“James Brown and Frank Sinatra are two different quantities in the universe. They represent two different experiences of the world.”
—Imamu Amiri Baraka [Everett Leroi Jones] (b. 1934)