RSA, a public key cryptography algorithm, relies for its security on the fact that factorizing a number that is the product of two large primes is hard. Very hard. […]
READ MOREEver since I read Jeff Atwood's article about Swoopo on Coding Horror, I've been fascinated about the strategies involved in bidding on such a site. Not fascinated enough (or indeed interested enough) to actually use real money of my own to do so, but to my mind it has all the hallmarks of some kind of remarkable result in advanced game theory. Basically Swoopo is an auction site where they're the ones putting up the items for auction. The suckers -- sorry, bidders -- bid for the items, but each bid costs money to place (something like 75 cents) and each bid extends the end time of the auction. […]
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