Understanding The Problem
As an example, consider the scenario in which a teacher with a class of 30 students asks for everybody's birthday, to determine whether any two students have the same birthday (corresponding to a hash collision as described below; for simplicity, ignore February 29). Intuitively, this chance may seem small. If the teacher picked a specific day (say September 16), then the chance that at least one student was born on that specific day is, about 7.9%. However, the probability that at least one student has the same birthday as any other student is around 70% (using the formula for n = 30).
Read more about this topic: Birthday Attack
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“The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.”
—Walter Lippmann (18891974)