prolyx · HackerTrans

4 jaar geledendiscuss

There are many ways of slicing and dicing things so that you group different sequences, e.g. group permutations as the same as you have done. But by "number" I was referring to a sequence of symbols drawn from a uniform distribution, so order matters. (On the website, you also choose options sequentially, anyways.)

prolyx

4 jaar geledendiscuss

Yeah, they would be far better off just guessing under 60 every time...

prolyx

4 jaar geledendiscuss

Precisely. A difference only arises when comparing sets of strings. In our example, the number of elements in the set uniform strings aaaa...a of length L is equal to the number of distinct symbols N, while the number of district strings of length L is N^L. So if you ask "will the string be uniform?" (which is the only reason you thought up aaaa..a in the first place) you find the probability is exponentially small for long strings: N^(1-L). Really if you tend to choose a string for any particular reason other than chance, it can be exploited as long as the reason can be guessed (e.g. the dice rolls 31415 write out the digits of pi.).

prolyx

4 jaar geledendiscuss

111111 is just as likely as any other number. However, in practice, humans are far more likely to think of 111111 than other numbers, so we exploit the difference between the probability a human guesses a number vs. the probability of rolling a number on a fair dice. "Did I just roll a sequence X or am I lying?" vs. "What is the probability I roll sequence X next?" are quite different questions, if by "lying" you mean you are not drawing the sequence from a fair, random source.

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