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
Famous quotes containing the word problem:
“The thinking person has the strange characteristic to like to create a fantasy in the place of the unsolved problem, a fantasy that stays with the person even when the problem has been solved and truth made its appearance.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)