Tag: random

Probability of winning a turn-based game with a random element

I am preparing for a programming exam on probability theory and I stumbled across a question I can’t solve.

Given a bag, which contains some given amount of white stones $ w$ and some given amount of black stones $ b$ , two players take turns drawing stones uniformly at random from the bag. After each player’s turn a stone, chosen uniformly at random, vanishes, and only then does the other player take their turn. If a white stone is drawn, the player, who has drawn it, instantly loses and the game ends. If the bag becomes empty, the player, who played second, wins.

What is the overall probability that the player, who played second, wins?

I assume it’s a dynamic programming question, though I can’t figure out the recursion formula. Any help would be greatly appreciated. 🙂

Example input: $ w$ = 3, $ b$ = 4, then the answer is, I believe, 0.4, which I arrived at after computing by hand all possible ways for the game to go, so not very efficient.

Is using Argon2 with a public random on client side a good idea to protect passwords in transit?

Not sure if things belongs in Crypto SE or here but anyway:

I’m building an app and I’m trying to decide whatever is secure to protect user passwords in transit, in addition to TLS we already have.

In server side, we already have bcrypt properly implemented and takes the password as an opaque string, salts and peppers it, and compares/adds to the database.

Even though SSL is deemed secure, I want to stay at the "server never sees plaintext" and "prevent MiTM eavesdropping from sniffing plaintext passwords" side of things. I know this approach doesn’t change anything about authenticating, anyone with whatever hash they sniff can still login, my concern is to protect users’ plaintext passwords before leaving their device.

I think Argon2 is the go-to option here normally but I can’t have a salt with this approach. If I have a random salt at client side that changes every time I hash my plaintext password, because my server just accepts the password as an opaque string, I can’t authenticate. Because of my requirements, I can’t have a deterministic "salt" (not sure if that can even be called a salt in this case) either (e.g. if I used user ID, I don’t have it while registering, I can’t use username or email either because there are places that I don’t have access to them while resetting password etc.) so my only option is using a static key baked into the client. I’m not after security by obscurity by baking a key into the client, I’m just trying to make it harder for an attacker to utilize a hash table for plain text passwords. I think it’s still a better practice than sending the password in plaintext or using no "salt" at all, but I’m not sure.

Bottomline: Compared to sending passwords in plaintext (which is sent over TLS anyway but to mitigate against server seeing plaintext passwords and against MiTM with fake certificates), is that okay to use Argon2 with a public but random value as "salt" to hash passwords, to protect user passwords in transit? Or am I doing something terribly wrong?

Random question!

Hello! I have a random question, hope it doesn’t feel misplaced. Does any know how to export the sites where senuke post into SER? The problem is my  projects keeps telling me Im blocked by the engine or there no sites to post!  

New Bytes generated from an true random bytes, still true random?

I have a question regarding "True Random".

I have a true random byte generated binary sequence produced from a QRNG hardware unit.

From this true random binary input sequence, I’ producing a new sequence by a pure description process of the binary input.

There is absolute no mathematical or algorithmic transformation of the binary input, the way we are producing the result is only based on the way we are describing the input binary sequence bit-per-bit.

Process Example (all the binary values are fake and only represented to illustrate the the case) :

  1. QRNG True Random binary input sequence -> 10101011
  2. Description process of represented input binary sequence (absolutely no logical or mathematical transformation of the binary structure during this process)
  3. The new produced binary sequence obtained from the process (2) -> 1100011010111110001100111100011010

My question is to know if we can consider the newly produced binary sequence as a real true random binary sequence because there is absolutely no transformation of the input, only a descriptive representation?

How to explain that this notion does not alter the TRUE RANDOM character of the entry?

What are the rules to respect to preserve the TRUE RANDOM character of a binary output and what are the operations that are authorized or not ?!

Thank you in advance for you support :)​

Best regards.

Does RLNC (Random Linear Network Coding) still need interaction from the other side to overcome packet loss reliably?

I’m looking into implementing RLNC as a project, and while I understand the concept of encoding the original data with random linear coefficients, resulting in a number of packets, sending those packets, and thus the client will be able to reconstruct the original data from some of the received packets, even if a few of the packets are lost, if enough encoded packets have arrived to create a solvable equation system.

However, I have not seen any mention of the fact that if there is a non zero percent of packet loss, there is a possibility that the receiver of the encoded packets will not receive enough packets to reconstruct the original data. The only solution I see to this is to implement some type of sequencing so that the receiver can verify he hasn’t missed some packets that would allow him to reconstruct the original data, in other words interaction. Am I missing some part of the algorithm or not? If someone has solved this problem already, can you please show me where it has been solved so I can read about it?

Dynamic Update for 2D Random Walk

I have code for a random walk

pt = Accumulate[{Sin@#, Cos@#} & /@ RandomReal[{0, 2 Pi}, 1000]]; boundary = {Min@pt, Max@pt}; Norm@Last@pt; ListLinePlot[pt, PlotRange -> {boundary, boundary}, AspectRatio -> 1]

which produces something like this:

Random Walk

I want to try to animate this, so that I can see how the random walk updates step by step with each new coordinate. I tried using DynamicUpdating but I couldn’t really get it to work. Is there any way to achieve this? Any help is extremely appreciated!

Returning random integer from interval based on last result and a seed

Suppose we have an interval of integers [a, b]. I would like to have a function that returns random members from within the interval, without repetitions. Once that all members within the interval are explored, the function would start to return the same first random sequence again, in the same order.

Example: a=1, b=5

3, 1, 4, 5, 2, 3, 1, 4, 5, 2, 3, 1, 4, 5, 2, ...

This would be easy to achieve by shuffling an array of all elements between a and b, and repeating it once the array is finished. However, this would take too much memory space, and this is not suitable for my case (I might have millions of elements).

Instead, the function I’d like to have would be more or less like this:

f(a, b, n, seed) -> n+1

Where:

a - start of interval b - end of interval n - last element returned from list seed - self-explanatory n+1 - next random element from list, calculated by using the seed and the last element returned (n)

The trick is knowing some way to get a non-repeated number from the interval based only on the element returned before and the seed. In the end, it would behave like a circular list randomized at its initialization, but without using memory space.

How can I generate a random sample of unique vertex pairings from a undirected graph, with uniform probability?

I’m working on a research project where I have to pair up entities together and analyze outcomes. Normally, without constraints on how the entities can be paired, I could easily select one random entity pair, remove it from the pool, then randomly select the next entity pair.

That would be like creating a random sample of vertex pairs from a complete graph.

However, this time around the undirected graph is now

  • incomplete
  • with a possibility that the graph might be disconnected.

I thought about using the above method but realized that my sample would not have a uniform probability of being chosen, as probabilities of pairings are no longer independent of each other due to uneven vertex degrees.

I’m banging my head at the wall for this. It’s best for research that I generate a sample with uniform probability. Given that my graph has around n = 5000 vertices, is there an algorithm that i could use such that the resulting sample fulfils these conditions?

  1. There are no duplicates in the sample (all vertices in the graph only is paired once).
  2. The remaining vertices that are not in the sample do not have an edge with each other. (They are unpaired and cannot be paired)
  3. The sample generated that meets the above two criteria should have a uniform probability of being chosen as compared to any other sample that fulfils the above two points.

There appear to be some work done for bipartite graphs as seen on this stackoverflow discussion here. The algorithms described obtains a near-uniform sample but doesn’t seem to be able to apply to this case.