5 ms·

> Why trust the randomizer? It's easy to do worse than random. Trying to do better than random often ends with doing worse than random, while aiming for random

> Why trust the randomizer? It's easy to do worse than random. Trying to do better than random often ends with doing worse than random, while aiming for randomness usually ends with randomness. > They thought they could randimize their way to fairness too, it looks pretty silly and ineffective in retrospect: I see information about the process but none about how and why it failed.

jackfoxy 6y ago
Yeah, wasn't Venice a republic for close to 1,000 years? What ultimately did in Venice was Napoleon conquering all of continental Europe.
- edgyquant 6y ago
  Eh they were essentially a monarchy by that point and power fell to the hands of a few families by the time of Marco Polo
  - fakedang 6y ago
    What's different from then and today?
    - edgyquant 6y ago
      Is this an honest question?
      - fakedang 6y ago
        Was being rhetorical.
michaelmior 6y ago
My interpretation of the comment about trusting the randomizer was how do we trust that selection was actually made randomly?
- fredophile 6y ago
  There are different types of random distributions. You can check the stats for the output and see if they fall in the expected distribution or not. To deal with someone tampering with the results and removing evidence of their tampering you'd need similar protections to what I'd expect on a device used for voting.
  - anfilt 6y ago
    You made me think about this we want system that assigns a judge, but can't be manipulated. I actually think it's possible with our current cryptographic tool box. This just a quick thought off the top of my head, I might have missed a case or a weakness. Cases normally are assigned a case number anyways already. So lets start from case number 0. First lets choose a nothing up my sleeve number. Let say like the fractional part of the PI with the bit length of some secure hash function. We can treat this case -1 or the initial state. The plaintiff and defendant each generate a private and public key pair. They then give each other their public keys. The plaintiff and defendant each sign the what will become the previous state with their private key. XOR the the two signatures together and then hash the XOR-ed signatures. This gives the new state. We then take this new state and take it to the modulus for the number judges. Just repeat this for each case new case. Neither the plaintiff nor the defendant should be able to directly influence who their judge is in this system. Also both can verify that other party performed a proper signature. Although there could be gotchas depending on the underline primitives from hash function to signing algorithm.
    - dmurray 6y ago
      Once you've agreed on who the eligible judges are, you can just have the plaintiff's lawyer and the defendant's lawyer meet up in a room and roll dice. This isn't a technical problem requiring advanced cryptography, it's a social or political problem. Also, your method is biased towards lower-number judges when the number of judges is not a factor of the range of the output of your hash function. Use an existing library instead.
      - 6y ago

jackfoxy 6y ago

Yeah, wasn't Venice a republic for close to 1,000 years? What ultimately did in Venice was Napoleon conquering all of continental Europe.

edgyquant 6y ago
Eh they were essentially a monarchy by that point and power fell to the hands of a few families by the time of Marco Polo
- fakedang 6y ago
  What's different from then and today?
  - edgyquant 6y ago
    Is this an honest question?
    - fakedang 6y ago
      Was being rhetorical.

michaelmior 6y ago

My interpretation of the comment about trusting the randomizer was how do we trust that selection was actually made randomly?

fredophile 6y ago
There are different types of random distributions. You can check the stats for the output and see if they fall in the expected distribution or not. To deal with someone tampering with the results and removing evidence of their tampering you'd need similar protections to what I'd expect on a device used for voting.
- anfilt 6y ago
  You made me think about this we want system that assigns a judge, but can't be manipulated. I actually think it's possible with our current cryptographic tool box. This just a quick thought off the top of my head, I might have missed a case or a weakness. Cases normally are assigned a case number anyways already. So lets start from case number 0. First lets choose a nothing up my sleeve number. Let say like the fractional part of the PI with the bit length of some secure hash function. We can treat this case -1 or the initial state. The plaintiff and defendant each generate a private and public key pair. They then give each other their public keys. The plaintiff and defendant each sign the what will become the previous state with their private key. XOR the the two signatures together and then hash the XOR-ed signatures. This gives the new state. We then take this new state and take it to the modulus for the number judges. Just repeat this for each case new case. Neither the plaintiff nor the defendant should be able to directly influence who their judge is in this system. Also both can verify that other party performed a proper signature. Although there could be gotchas depending on the underline primitives from hash function to signing algorithm.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    Once you've agreed on who the eligible judges are, you can just have the plaintiff's lawyer and the defendant's lawyer meet up in a room and roll dice. This isn't a technical problem requiring advanced cryptography, it's a social or political problem. Also, your method is biased towards lower-number judges when the number of judges is not a factor of the range of the output of your hash function. Use an existing library instead.
    - 6y ago