"However, if it stays up, neither party will know whether the other fancies them or not."
But the person (if any) who contributed a 1 will know. This appears to be within the parameters of what they were setting out to do¹, but that's no excuse for sloppy write-up…
¹Which is not entirely clear, as cartesiandaemon points out.
My favorite part (so far at least): But whoever controls the computer gets to know the choice of both parties. This is equivalent to A and B giving their spheres to a passer-by who is then supposed to tell them whether or not both spheres were heavy. With A and B being shy to the point of paranoia, this disclosure is not acceptable unless the passer-by is immediately murdered after the operation. However such a practice could never succeed on a large scale, because passers-by would soon become wary of weighing spheres for strangers.
It's good to see that they mentioned the obvious attack (which I've thought every time I see any scheme of this nature, be it cryptographic or TTP) of claiming to fancy the other person in order to find out whether they fancy you, and then admitting afterwards (if necessary) that that was why you said yes.
I don't think they really defended it credibly, though.
I though the probabilistic algorithm mitigated it to some extent too, given that it gives both parties plausible deniability (or maybe just facilitates it, I'm not sure). In fact, that was essentially the same as many things people do in real life, so I can't decide if they were deliberately drawing it from actual dating behaviour or not.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-10 02:15 pm (UTC)http://www.ongar.org/archive2007/works/weight.txt
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-10 02:56 pm (UTC)I just have this vision of
Person A: Hi! Do you want to find out if we fancy each other?
Person B: Uh...
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-10 03:30 pm (UTC)But the person (if any) who contributed a 1 will know. This appears to be within the parameters of what they were setting out to do¹, but that's no excuse for sloppy write-up…
¹Which is not entirely clear, as
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-10 03:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-10 05:21 pm (UTC)But whoever controls the computer gets to know the choice of both parties.
This is equivalent to A and B giving their spheres to a passer-by who is then
supposed to tell them whether or not both spheres were heavy. With A and B
being shy to the point of paranoia, this disclosure is not acceptable unless the
passer-by is immediately murdered after the operation. However such a practice
could never succeed on a large scale, because passers-by would soon become wary
of weighing spheres for strangers.
They had too much fun writing this, I think.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-10 05:36 pm (UTC)They had too much fun writing this, I think.
Well, they were entirely at liberty to say "balls" wherever they said "spheres" and totally managed to resist :)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-10 08:00 pm (UTC)I don't think they really defended it credibly, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-10 08:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-10 08:58 pm (UTC)I though the probabilistic algorithm mitigated it to some extent too, given that it gives both parties plausible deniability (or maybe just facilitates it, I'm not sure). In fact, that was essentially the same as many things people do in real life, so I can't decide if they were deliberately drawing it from actual dating behaviour or not.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-02-10 09:01 pm (UTC)Yes, I thought that! I was surprised not to see them drawing the parallel explicitly, in fact.