

Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code  - sharksandwich
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124648494429082661.html

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pmjordan
I'm no crypto expert, but I'm guessing nobody had previously cracked it
because they hadn't really tried. By today's standards at least, it seems
relatively straighforward.

I love how obviously human-generated the key is: "13, 34, 57, 65, 22, 78, 49."
- the differences between the two digits are almost all 0, 1 or 2. As a
species, we must really resent random numbers.

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michael_dorfman
True, but 200 years ago random numbers were harder to come by.

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pmjordan
As indicated by tetha's comment, that's not really true. Nature is a pretty
good RNG. I was more amazed that someone who seems to have taken a keen
interest in cryptography would not be concerned with generating good keys.
Maybe I should expect that of someone who lived 200 years ago. I don't know.

(yes, the numbers could of course be truly random, but they don't seem it to
me)

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michael_dorfman
Just out of curiosity, what's your favorite technique for generating random
numbers from nature? Let's say 7 numbers between 0 and 99.

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jimfl
With a Lava Lamp:

<http://www.lavarnd.org/>

Or with alpha-decay:

<http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6745217.html>

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michael_dorfman
Either of those work well 200 years ago? I didn't think so.

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yan
The thing with feeding truly random numbers to a person is that they never
seem "random enough," so you'll have people rejecting a stochastic process
because they see patterns, so they'll go out of their way to make it look more
like noise, and decreasing the entropy.

