At 6:32 PM -0700 6/22/99, bram wrote:
>The following is a message I originally posted to coderpunks. The article
>it refers to can be found at
>http://www.iacr.org/newsletter/curr/bridge.html
>
>The last IACR newsletter mentions that bridge tournaments are having
>trouble generating random deck shuffles, and suggests that the
>cryptographic community should in a show of good faith (and, in my
>opinion, a display of competence,) help them out.
>...
I think it would be good if the bridge folk slowed down a bit and tried to
separate the problem from their ideas on how to solve it.
Here are some questions that occur to me off the top:
What is the time line they need. I.e. if the start of the tournament is
time zero. What is the earliest time the hands can be prepared and what is
the latest time?
How many hands do you need per tournament?
How are hands created now? There are 52! bridge hands, so a random hand has
log2(56!) = 226 bits of entropy or 68 decimal digits worth. Are they
generating that much entropy per hand now? If so, how?
How much hardware can one assume? (e.g. a loptop and a scanner, maybe
duplicated for reliability)
Would a public seed selection session immediately prior to the tournament
be acceptable? (I have in mind publiclly scanning in the morning's stock
market report or some such)
Can one assume Internet access at the tournament? If not, is that an option
at most tournaments?
Arnold Reinhold
