Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister
 
PerlMonks  

Re: Dreams of Probability

by adrianh (Chancellor)
on Dec 17, 2002 at 15:58 UTC ( [id://220559]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Dreams of Probability

If the word is randomly chosen from the dictionary, then there isn't any general method that would get the solution faster than trying them all in order.

For your particular dream - you might be able to make it easier if the lock isn't clever about words that have other words in them, e.g. if the password was "form" and you said "forming" would it unlock? If so you could go for the words that include other words in them to cut out more possibilities per-guess.

Perl and a pronunciation dictionary might be able to help in this case :-)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
(tye)Re: Dreams of Probability
by tye (Sage) on Dec 17, 2002 at 17:00 UTC
    If the word is randomly chosen from the dictionary, then there isn't any general method that would get the solution faster than trying them all in order.

    Of course there is! Read the shortest words first where "short" refers to how quickly you can read the word aloud.

    Just be sure to not count the sorting time in the benchmark and don't let them find out about your strategy or they'll pick the longest word next time... unless you can let them know of your strategy in a way where they think you don't know that they know, in which case next time you'd be pretty sure they did pick the longest word... but they'd probably not pick the very longest word, just a really long word, so it'd be better if you could get them to think you thought they didn't know that you knew that they knew so they'd pick a really short word because you could go through short words faster since they are, well, short... unless there are a lot more short words in the dictionary than long words, ...

            - tye (well, you get the idea)
      Of course there is! Read the shortest words first where "short" refers to how quickly you can read the word aloud.

      You're right :-) I was assuming a constant time per authentication attempt.

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://220559]
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others musing on the Monastery: (5)
As of 2024-03-29 13:44 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found