this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
53 points (94.9% liked)

Asklemmy

43945 readers
638 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] AndrasKrigare@beehaw.org 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I think the responses with an encrypted/committed guess being made public, a public result, and then a reveal of the key, have it right for the scenario of people making guesses as to the result of a flip.

Re-reading your question, though, refers more to there being an agreed result for a group of people as opposed to checking a guess. I think this would require a bit of a variation. The trivial method would be to use the previous method and assign "correct guess" to heads and "incorrect guess" as tails, but this only works if you don't believe that any two members are colluding with each other.

Another solution would be to have each member generate a random number and encrypt it, and post the encrypted value. After all have been posted, everyone posts the key to decrypt their number, and adds up all the numbers together and takes the sum modulo the number of options (2 in the case of a coin) and matches it with a predetermined mapping. For instance, if 1 is heads and 0 is tails, and the sum of the numbers is 63752, 63752 % 2 = 0 which is tails.

There are a couple gotchas to prevent errors. There has to be an agreed upon maximum number which is one less than a multiple of the number of options. For instance, if random numbers are allowed from 0 to 2 inclusively, there is a bias towards tails (0 % 2 == 0, 1 %2 == 1, 2 % 2 == 0). The other is the encryption algorithm would need to be chosen such that multiple keys can't easily be created to provide different valid decrypts. This would also likely require some padding to the clear text, which could be achieved by some member of the group posting some arbitrary text first, and then all members appending that text to their number before encrypting it.