> Essentially impossible if it were randomly selected.
You would say the same of any seed I gave you. You've just artificially assigned this number with some sort of emotional importance.
You would say the same of any seed I gave you. You've just artificially assigned this number with some sort of emotional importance.
I can think any number of programming mistakes that will result in a supposed (pseudo-)random number generator to be be biased to very small numbers. I have made such mistakes myself.
By any reasonable estimate, the probability of randomly picking a number below 256 is MUCH smaller than the probability of someone having made a mistake.
That doesn't make sense, does it?
If you generate a random number with equal distribution in a gigantic range, 0 is just as likely to happen as any other number in the range, right?
That's the meaning of "equal distribution".
In a working RNG, every number has equal probability.
But there's a probability <1 that the RNG is working as it should and a probability >0 that the RNG erroneously generates numbers that aren't equally distributed.
And because the range of possible numbers is so large and the probability of a mistake is not that tiny, a small result is more likely to be an error than a random result that happens to be small.
If I write a program to flip a coin and it generates heads 30 times in a row, is it more likely that this is just a random result or that I made a mistake in my programming?
One probability is 2^30, and the probability that someone makes an error resulting in this pattern is probably higher than 1/2^30.
"Playing roulette, in isolation after RED - RED - RED - RED - RED, there is not a higher chance of getting BLACK than RED in the next run. But in practice, one would be correct in concluding that it will probably be BLACK. The proof is that in our test, the next run gave BLACK".
Said differently, it was not particularly unlikely that the number would be 4. But maybe it got the attention of the person who decided to try assuming that it was a mistake, and they were indeed lucky.
The hypothesis is "I see a small number, I can test if it is broken or not... oh it is". Could totally have been "no it's all good, just happened to be a small number".
> In this case one cert gets defeated and you go the odds of that number being that low are 2^-384.
It just happened that that particular number got the attention of a human, which was luck. But in terms of statistics, this number was not less likely than another one.