[7922] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: human failings question
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton)
Wed Oct 4 18:17:20 2000
Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 03:44:07 +1000
From: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@samba.org>
To: Rick Smith <rick_smith@securecomputing.com>
Cc: "Nina H. Fefferman" <feferman@math.princeton.edu>, coderpunks@toad.com,
cryptography@c2.net
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.0.20001004095836.00bc15e0@mailhost.sctc.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.4.05.10010050339570.24041-100000@samba.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Rick Smith wrote:
> At 08:07 PM 10/3/00, Nina H. Fefferman wrote:
>
> > Does anyone know where (if at all) I can find statistics for the
> >predictable strings humans tend to produce when asked to create a
> >"random" sequence of zeros and ones? Maybe cognitive science papers?
> > Has anyone seen these?
> Ooh, if you ever find such a thing, I'd love to see it. I didn't know that
> anyone had ever produced such a study. I've heard of a few things close to
> this, though:
there are also some quite interesting examples in neal stephenson's
cryptonomicon.
"why are _you_ here? [they are on a beach in norway, during the 2nd world
war]"
"because mrs simpson has been cheating at bingo"
???
[explained later that mrs simpson had a tendency to cheat by looking at
the letters as she dipped into the bingo machine]
psychological avoidance of certain letters not commonly used in english
words - such as z - i vaguely remember as the reason given...
as to _actual_ studies? sorry, no clue :) $AUD 0.02 of useless
contribution strikes again. :)
luke
