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:
“It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don’t put psychotics in high places and we’ve got the problem solved.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)