[alexey-salmin]

> In the late 1990s the development platform ASF Software supplied several online poker providers, such as Planet Poker, with card-shuffling algorithms. The platform even posted the algorithm on its website as proof that the game was reliably programmed.

What amazes me is the level of overconfidence the developers of the broken algorithm had to post it online. I mean it's not that the probability theory was a novel and unexplored field at the time.

[caminante]

Not sure "overconfidence" applies as you might be stretching the author's unfounded narrative.

This is more impressive than the alternatives:

1. Security through obscurity.

2. Increased financial liability due to #1.

[alexey-salmin]

Imagine you proudly present to the public your obviously flawed version of the algorithm even though the correct version is known for decades. If only you've read a single book on the topic.

If that's not overconfidence then it's hard to find what is.

[caminante]

You're just restating your initial claim and not addressing the issue I raised with the latter.

[alexey-salmin]

What is the issue? Not at all clear from your comment. You're saying above it's better than security by obscurity but it's beside the point.

[caminante]

> but it's beside the point

Why is it beside the point?

You haven't established their intent for gross negligence and give no charity to the fact this was 30 years ago (pre-Wikipedia and the search breadth we have today). Since then, people have continued to expose severe RNG design flaws in other systems designed by very smart people. It happens...

[alexey-salmin]

30 years ago it wasn't dark ages. Wikipedia didn't exist but books on probability theory and statistics did.

When you do a shuffling algorithm in a sensitive context (money or security), you have prove that it returns all the possible permutations with equal probability plus put lower bounds on the amount of entropy you need from the underlying RNG. If you're unable to prove it, you shouldn't move forward with the algorithm. Any irregularities in the output distribution can be exploited. This is textbook knowledge pioneered in early encryption works and perfected by the time WWII ended. Evidently the effort to prove correctness was never made.

Now the original article can indeed misrepresent or omit important facts. I'm definitely open to reconsider my conclusion if more facts become available. However "there was no Wikipedia" isn't one of them, it doesn't count as an excuse not to do your job properly.

If it turned out, for example, that "ASF Software" wasn't even aware that their shuffling algorithm was used to shuffle cards and just shipped it along with 200 other basic algorithms as a some sort of "better standard library", this would change the situation. However from the quick googling it seems that their product wasn't a standard library, it was specifically software for Texas Hold'em. This is a "you had one job" kind of situation.

> Since then, people have continued to expose severe RNG design flaws in other systems designed by very smart people. It happens...

Absolutely, but we're not talking frontiers of Computer Science here.

* If you seed your RNG with at most 86 million unique values, you get at most 86 million unique random sequences out of it.

* If your code should have M possible equiprobable outcomes, it has N equiprobable outcomes, and N doesn't divide M, you're in trouble.

[48terry]

...They posted their algorithm as a way to prove it was reliable. Someone pointed out it wasn't reliable. They revised the algorithm. What's the problem here?

[alexey-salmin]

They were selling this algorithm for money and evidently didn't use any of that money to hire a single statistician to validate it. The mistake they've made isn't obscure and doesn't require a thousand pairs of eyes to catch, just one.

Imagine paying to a professional plumber, he installs the toilet upside down and then posts the photos online for the community to check his work.