4 ms·

> For a 200-metre section, Dr Lauer calculates, there is about one chance in a trillion that it is duplicated anywhere on the 2.3bn kilometres of track currentl

> For a 200-metre section, Dr Lauer calculates, there is about one chance in a trillion that it is duplicated anywhere on the 2.3bn kilometres of track currently laid around the world. Uh, isn’t this the wrong calculation though? We don’t care about the chance of collision between a particular section and any other section, we care about the chance that any pair of sections collide. Birthday paradox stuff.

teraflop 4y ago
I don't think the birthday paradox is exactly the right model either. By itself, a matching fingerprint between two different rail sections on opposite sides of the world wouldn't present a problem, as long as the train knows its initial location and is smart enough to know it couldn't have instantly teleported. You just need a low enough probability of collisions between nearby pairs of track segments in order to not get lost. But in any case, the statement you quotes smells like very sloppy statistics. There's a huge difference between saying that the pattern of permeability is unpredictable, and saying it's random -- the latter is a very strong assumption. It's easy to imagine ways the measurement could have local or global biases towards particular kinds of patterns, and the existence of any such effects would make the "one in a trillion" number completely meaningless. On top of that, the article says magnetic permeability isn't part of the official material specifications. What happens if the railroad operator switches to a new supplier, whose process results in rails that are much more uniform? This seems to be the research group's web page: https://www.mrt.kit.edu/disensor/ https://www.mrt.kit.edu/disensor/ I looked for a published paper that would go into more detail, but I couldn't find one.
- uup 4y ago
  If there were biases, then the pattern of permeability would be predictable. For instance, encrypted data is not random, but it's not predictable.
sudhirj 4y ago
The birthday paradox has a factor for the number of people in the room - the question isn’t usually who else has the same birthday in the entire universe, it’s who else within loud talking distance. Here restricting the search to a radius of known starting positions should suffice.
7952 4y ago
These sections would be sequential making the search space very small.

teraflop 4y ago

I don't think the birthday paradox is exactly the right model either. By itself, a matching fingerprint between two different rail sections on opposite sides of the world wouldn't present a problem, as long as the train knows its initial location and is smart enough to know it couldn't have instantly teleported. You just need a low enough probability of collisions between nearby pairs of track segments in order to not get lost. But in any case, the statement you quotes smells like very sloppy statistics. There's a huge difference between saying that the pattern of permeability is unpredictable, and saying it's random -- the latter is a very strong assumption. It's easy to imagine ways the measurement could have local or global biases towards particular kinds of patterns, and the existence of any such effects would make the "one in a trillion" number completely meaningless. On top of that, the article says magnetic permeability isn't part of the official material specifications. What happens if the railroad operator switches to a new supplier, whose process results in rails that are much more uniform? This seems to be the research group's web page: https://www.mrt.kit.edu/disensor/ https://www.mrt.kit.edu/disensor/ I looked for a published paper that would go into more detail, but I couldn't find one.

uup 4y ago
If there were biases, then the pattern of permeability would be predictable. For instance, encrypted data is not random, but it's not predictable.

sudhirj 4y ago

The birthday paradox has a factor for the number of people in the room - the question isn’t usually who else has the same birthday in the entire universe, it’s who else within loud talking distance. Here restricting the search to a radius of known starting positions should suffice.

7952 4y ago

These sections would be sequential making the search space very small.