Related papers: Attacking ApSimon's Mints
In this paper we consider a scenario where there are several algorithms for solving a given problem. Each algorithm is associated with a probability of success and a cost, and there is also a penalty for failing to solve the problem. The…
One of the biggest problems with the Internet technology is the unwanted spam emails. The well disguised phishing email comes in as part of the spam and makes its entry into the inbox quite frequently nowadays. While phishing is normally…
This is a survey paper on Poisson approximation using Stein's method of exchangeable pairs. We illustrate using Poisson-binomial trials and many variations on three classical problems of combinatorial probability: the matching problem, the…
I present a fairly detailed discussion of various contributions to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon a_mu. I try to give an unbiased evaluation of the validity of the SM prediction for this quantity and to point out some delicate…
In coin tossing two remote participants want to share a uniformly distributed random bit. At the least in the quantum version, each participant test whether or not the other has attempted to create a bias on this bit. It is requested that,…
A variant of the well-known Set Covering Problem is studied in this paper, where subsets of a collection have to be selected, and pairwise conflicts among subsets of items exist. The selection of each subset has a cost, and the inclusion of…
Preventing data exfiltration from computer systems typically depends on perimeter defences, but these are becoming increasingly fragile. Instead we suggest an approach in which each at-risk document is supplemented by many fake versions of…
We present three very simple variants of the classic Heads or Tails game using chips, each of which contributes to our understanding of the Bitcoin protocol. The first variant addresses the issue of temporary Bitcoin forks, which occur when…
BitCoin transactions are malleable in a sense that given a transaction an adversary can easily construct an equivalent transaction which has a different hash. This can pose a serious problem in some BitCoin distributed contracts in which…
Given two sets of data which lead to a similar statistical conclusion, the Simpson Paradox describes the tactic of combining these two sets and achieving the opposite conclusion. Depending upon the given data, this may or may not succeed.…
This paper introduces a strategy in the two envelopes problem that utilizes the prior beliefs of two players about the amount of money that their envelopes can contain. This strategy gives them more information about the decision of…
Parsons problems are a type of programming activity that present learners with blocks of existing code and requiring them to arrange those blocks to form a program rather than write the code from scratch. Micro Parsons problems extend this…
Consider the coupon collector problem where each box of a brand of cereal contains a coupon and there are n different types of coupons. Suppose that the probability of a box containing a coupon of a specific type is $1/n$ and that we keep…
We consider a generalisation of the classical coupon collector's problem, in which at each time step a collector either receives a new copy of a randomly chosen coupon, or loses all their previously collected copies of that coupon. We…
We show that a simple eavesdropper listening in on classical communication between potentially entangled quantum parties will eventually be able to impersonate any of the parties. Furthermore, the attack is efficient if one-way puzzles do…
Quantum money is a cryptographic protocol in which a mint can produce a quantum state, no one else can copy the state, and anyone (with a quantum computer) can verify that the state came from the mint. We present a concrete quantum money…
Itemset mining is one of the most studied tasks in knowledge discovery. In this paper we analyze the computational complexity of three central itemset mining problems. We prove that mining confident rules with a given item in the head is…
A simple computer-based algorithm has been developed to identify pre-modern coins minted from the same dies, intending mainly coins minted by hand-made dies designed to be applicable to images taken from auction websites or catalogs. Though…
Faced with a sequence of N binary events, such as coin flips (or Ising spins), it is natural to ask whether these events reflect some underlying dynamic signals or are just random. Plausible models for the dynamics of hidden biases lead to…
This paper collects polynomial Diophantine equations that are simple to state but apparently difficult to solve.