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How Allies Used Math Against German Tanks
Pepebuho writes "This an article about how the allies were able to estimate the number of German tanks produced in World War 2 based on the serial numbers of the tanks. Neat! Godwin does not apply."
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Why is all this military intelligence stuff presented as so difficult? You can just look at the board and see what the other player's pieces look like.
No points for mentioning the old prank of labeling $looseAnimal 1, 2, 3, and 5.
Well good for the bean counters then. I'm sure a vastly more important question would be, "where is the largest concentration of tanks?"
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
If I want to quote Mike Godwin, you quote-Nazis aren't going to stop me. All he said was, the longer an Internet discussion goes on, the more likely it is that someone will mention Hitler. Well, duh.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Note to self for world domination plans: don't stamp my robots/tanks/drones with plain text serial numbers, always encrypt! :-)
FTA: "Using these methods, the Allies deduced that the German military industrial complex churned out around 1,400 tanks each month from June 1940 through September 1942. That just didn’t seem right."
Pfft, my factory in Starcraft 2 lets me roll out at least twice that number every day.
Also the first tank serial # should not be 1.
Try something like 24370239.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
You could of course use this to make your enemy overestimate the number of tanks you have by incrementing serial numbers by a random number between 1 and 10 each time you make a tank. I think there were reports of the soviets doing this during the cold war with the tail numbers of aircraft to make it look like their squadrons were bigger than they really were.
Here's the original source... from July 2006.
well... if Hitler actually WERE a genius.... or if any of his followers/lackies had balls enough to lend the man some brains, we'd probably all be speaking German now... so... good thing they did stupid shit like that.....
minimum-variance unbiased estimator (MVUE, or UMVU estimator)
I think this only works if most of the tanks that are no longer in service, are in your collection of serial numbers. If you send your first 1K produced to the western front and the next 1K produced to the eastern front, the US/English/etc are going to calculate a number about 1/2 as high as the Russians.
So, in theory either the Germans sent certain model of tank only to certain fronts, or the western and eastern guys were sharing data, or maybe the Germans sent all the odds west and all the evens east or something.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You know who else was able to estimate the number of German tanks?
SSC
I have an uncle with a small lighting business. He has one truck, proudly labeled #6. I guess the German's didn't think about their tanks as an advertising canvas.
This is very similar to the method that the CIA used to get a seat at the Big Boys table in U.S. Intelligence operations in the 1950s. When OSS became the CIA after WWII, they became a junior member of the U.S. Intelligence operations. In the 1950s, the Defense Intelligence Agency (I may have the wrong department, but it was the organization that got the lion's share of the U.S. Intelligence budget) estimated how many intercontinental bombers the Soviets had by looking at the size of the factories where they produced them and estimating how many the U.S. could produce in a factory of that many square feet. The CIA wanted to get a bigger chunk of the Intelligence budget, so they started looking at satellite photos of the Russian bombers. They noticed that the numbers on the tails of Soviet bombers went 1, 2, 3, 4, 5....11,12, 13, 14, 15,...21, 22, 23, 24, 25, etc. Based on this they determined that the Soviets had many fewer bombers than earlier estimates. When other sources provided corroborating evidence, the CIA was able to get a bigger chunk of the Intelligence budget. Of course, they then made the same sort of mistake in estimating ICBMs that they had corrected with this methodology.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Probably best to hash them.
That way, you don't need any particularly privileged crypto keys floating around(only the plaintext serials, and each one of them only reveals one hashed serial) and a logistics officer in possession of a plaintext serial can trivially generate the hashed serial and verify it against a piece of hardware. People below a certain security level can just be handed the hashed serials for the stuff they are supposed to keep track of, thus preventing large lists of plaintext serials from floating around in questionably secure locations or hands.
Reminds me of the Seal Team 6 story. The US Navy made a Seal Team 1 and 2, then skipped up to 6 -- to make it seem like there was a total of 6 teams, when there were really only 3.
This all rests on the assumption that the Germans were logical and used a predictable sequential serial number scheme. If they hadn't you'd have potentially gotten some very wrong answers out of this exercise in statistics.
Of course the truly dangerous thing would be to have plausibly wrong answers, not wildly wrong ones. You can discount a finding that they produce 4 tanks a month or that they produce 50,000. But 120 or 700 could be plausible enough to be accepted and then lead to miscalculations from basis.
It can work backwards. At the Battle of Verdun in WW1, Petain (who only became an anti-hero in WW2) rotated French regiments through the Verdun front (a system called noria) so that whole regiments would not be destroyed. The Germans left their troops in battle till all were killed. From captured French uniforms and the number of regiments recorded, they greatly over-estimated the size of the French defense.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
"Those are my lucky numbers."
Ira Goldenberg,
Lottery Winner 1993
They used it to estimate that the Germans produced 255 tanks per month between the summer of 1940 and the fall of 1942. Turns out the serial-number methodology was spot on. After the war, internal German data put der Führer's production at 256 tanks per month -- one more than the estimate.
It's comforting to realize I'm not the only one plagued by off-by-one errors!
And what's with the power-of-two number--Numerology or what?
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
I am implementing this at my factory. In fact, tanks c4ca4238a0b923820dcc509a6f75849b, c81e728d9d4c2f636f067f89cc14862c, eccbc87e4b5ce2fe28308fd9f2a7baf3, a87ff679a2f3e71d9181a67b7542122c, and e4da3b7fbbce2345d7772b0674a318d5 just rolled off of the the assembly line.
Actually, I think the best course of action would be to stamp false serial numbers / easy-to-decrypt serial numbers. Giving the enemy false information is likely better than none at all.
Of course, I guess that means the "real" serial numbers will have to be encrypted...
and just where do you think it all began
Reminds me of the prank where you release 3 goats with the numbers 1, 2 and 4 on them and watch while everybody searches for the one with the number 3 on it.
Meanwhile in "Spy Catcher", Peter Wright explains how they put numbers 1, 3, 7, 8, etc. onto their bugging wires in an embassy, just for the psychological effect on anyone who found them all and would tear the building apart looking for the missing numbered wires
256 tanks per turn? Impossible! That would take a regular supply of 1280 IPCs...
Or do what the leader of Seal Team Six did.
Supposedly he named the team 6 to create the false impression there were 6 seal teams when the number was less.
So couldn't you just inflate the numbers of your World Dominating machines... heck the first 6 digits could be a model number or something.
Haha, a very good point, the code breakers probably had their hands full with the enigma machine at the time too!
The number of Sherman tanks alone that the US produced was double the whole Axis tank output for the entire war. Even though the Shermans were no match for German tanks (guns too small, armor too weak), it didn't matter because we had so many. It was kind of like the Liberty ships -- they were easily sunk, but Germany didn't have enough U-boats to sink them all.
dom
They have "Panzers". Know the difference between your Civilizations. Yeesh!
Neighter in the summary nor in the article there was any mentioning of naz...(*ç/%()=/ç*/ç(")*/"()*/"()
NO CARRIER
Now we are fighting two wars (Afghanistan and Pakistan). Even that is proving to be a handful. Can USA stand up to a mighty enemy likes of WW II Germany or Japan?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
My dad drove a tank in WWII. I believe one of the Churchills but I'm no war historian and I'm happy to be shown otherwise. He was in the Normandy landings and eventually in the invasion of Berlin too.
Thing is, the German tanks had bigger guns and longer ranges - significantly longer. There was apparently a speed advantage to the British tank (I'm going by what I was told, again I'm not a WWII-buff by any means) though, so what they used to do was lure the German tank into a village, then drive round back of them. The German guns were so big they couldn't turn them in in a normal street with buildings on either side whereas the smaller British tank certainly could. Not sure this was by design, but they took any advantage they could of course and I'm told that this trick was used by my dad a number of times.
Cheers,
Ian
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1. However, the moment Godwin's Law is mentioned, the probability equals 1.
Hell, if Hitler had just had better weather there's a good chance you'd all be speaking German right now. Those of you that survived, that is.
Even in 1945, the Allied advance was often held up for long periods by children with Panzerfausts. Militarily, the Sherman (and the British Churchill) were terrible mistakes.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
analyzing the tatooed numbers on holocaust's survivors' arms to determine how many actually got killed?
Unlike tanks, not all holocaust victims had serial numbers tattooed on their bodies.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Much is said about the 5:1 tank ratio (Sherman:Panzer), which did have an impact for rapidly owning ground. Air superiority was the winner, as the Germans couldn't reliably resupply their own troops. Rocket attacks from the Typhoons (and other similarly-equipped planes) on German armoured columns laid waste to reinforcement efforts.
Ich spreche Deutsch jetzt, Sie unempfindlicher Erdklumpen.
Supposedly, there was an underground fibre optic install running between several of the Las Vegas casinos back in the 1980's, where every box junction and repeater had a serial number that fit some zany formula, i.e. for anything that really belonged in the system, the sum of the first and fourth digits was always twice the absolute value of the difference of the third and eighth digits. The system was used for something like sending pictures of suspected card counters and other cheats back and forth, and particularly sending pics of anyone you had just booted out of your casino to the others in the chain. Hardware got swapped out or altered frequently, as new casinos and hotels were added to the system. Someone supposedly treked through the storm drains and such every few months and, depending on the story, either looked for serial numbers that didn't fit the checksum system, or alternately, the grunt workers just wrote down all the serial numbers and turned the list in to someone who knew that the system was in place, as they weren't told about the checksum part. Once you stop using random serial numbers, there are lots of things you can do with selected ones.
Who is John Cabal?
Then you just do the analysis twice, once calculating the upper estimate and once calculating a lower estimate. You increase the variance but don't really prevent the attack from working. To prevent the mathletes from doing the analysis at all you need to either encrypt it (in which case the crypto-letes move in) or use randomly generated serial numbers, which might get interesting using WWII technology with production spread out over a war torn continent.
I am implementing this at my factory. In fact, tanks c4ca4238a0b923820dcc509a6f75849b, c81e728d9d4c2f636f067f89cc14862c, eccbc87e4b5ce2fe28308fd9f2a7baf3, a87ff679a2f3e71d9181a67b7542122c, and e4da3b7fbbce2345d7772b0674a318d5 just rolled off of the the assembly line.
You should at least use some salt if you just use md5 on those serial numbers... I could decode your serial numbers just by using publicly available reverse md5 lookup table...
Kudos for the Axis and Allies reference...
no, no, no
the prank is you release 3 sharks with the numbers 1, 2 and 4 on them and watch while everybody searches for the one with the number 3 on it...
in all seriousness WHO THE BLEEP EVER HEARD OF THAT PRANK BEFORE
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Also the first tank serial # should not be 1. Try something like 24370239.
Hitler knew this trick: he was member number 555 of the DAP, the first member had number 501. When the DAP changed into the NSDAP, he became member number 1.
On the arms production side, USA was able to convert so many auto factories into tank factories and airplane factories. Allies had breakthroughs in cryptography. The Generals were at least listening to the statisticians. Or at least the quants were able to get their idea up the chain of command. And people bought war bonds and planted victory gardens.
Now we are fighting two wars (Afghanistan and Pakistan). Even that is proving to be a handful. Can USA stand up to a mighty enemy likes of WW II Germany or Japan?
Did you miss the whole cold war? Lucky you.
Basically, the USA figured out the whole nuclear weapon thing back in the mid-1940s, and pretty much everyone else figured it out shortly afterward. From this came the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Tactically, this means that the only wars that will be fought from now on will be asymmetrical, or between developing powers. A war between any two "mighty enemies" will end in the death of us all.
But, I have always called them minion 1, minion 2, etc. Ok, so 2 is the largest I ever got to, but you can't defy tradition. It's traditional, you know.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I read the title as 'Meth':
For once a misreading made perfect sense in the summary title's context: use of amphetamines throughout World War II on land and air personnel is well-documented. There's a phrase one hears infrequently that amphetamines 'won the Battle of Britain' - fending off constant attack from the Luftwaffe made necessary the use of stimulants as hiring and training a new pilot took too long. Whether it really did tip the scales in that battle we'll never know. As one would expect abuse orose within both Allied and Axis forces, and the spike in use persisted after the war. The Vietnam conflict saw American troops use methamphetamine very widely, and today the drug is popular amongst the poor as a relatively inexpensive stimulant.
If there's anything that isn't widely known by the public and merits publicizing it's history of drugs such as this in the context of 20th century events like warfare. What laid ground for a forerunner to the modern drugs situation to me represents a phenomena of greater gravity than the serial numbers of tanks which one would expect would be used simply through using good old oxymoronic common sense.
Presently there's a drug by the name of 'Modafinil' which mimics amphetamine but removes almost entirely the euphoric element and much of the crash that accompanies sudden cessation. It has been around for a number of years, and sees much use in modern conflicts. It also has much off-label use, and has even been used by astronauts to cope with heavy exercise regimens.
This an article about how the allies where able to estimate the number of German Tanks produced based on the Serial Numbers of the Tanks. Neat!. Godwin does not apply.
Seriously?!?! Is there an editor in the house? Try:
This [is] an article about how the [Allies were] able to estimate the number of German Tanks produced based on the Serial Numbers of the Tanks. Neat!. Godwin does not apply.
Geesh!
Thats the point...
You mean the prank where you release 3 goats, and everyone just looks at you and says "Wow, sucks that your goats got loose. Good luck catching them," and then goes back to playing beach volleyball?
The enemies of Democracy are
# date +%s|md5sum
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
1959 - still in "1950s".
Though, it is probably more likely the GP is referring to U-2 photos.
Article contains content copied verbatim from wikipedia.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
The statistics are straightforwardly extended to estimate both lower and upper bounds. Somewhere there was a post complaining about the concentration of tanks. If the lower bound estimates differ by geography then you could work out the tank distribution algorithm.
Kind of an odd thought, but did the Nazis use a fresh/sterilized tattoo needle for each prisoner?
Not sure how concerned they were for the health of the prisoners.
Trolling is a art,
Meanwhile, the Germans assigned numbers to U-boats, but not consecutively. Their first U-boats were U-25 and U-26. They could have done the same thing with tanks: allocate blocks of numbers to manufacturers, and make sure the blocks were mixed up. Serial numbers have to be unique, not consecutive.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Also the first tank serial # should not be 1.
Try something like 24370239.
And count down, not up. That'll confuse the hell out of them.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
no, no, no
the prank is you release 3 sharks with the numbers 1, 2 and 4 on them and watch while everybody searches for the one with the number 3 on it...
But that one is easy: You just have to look for the laser.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
How Allies Used Math Against German Tanks
And we teach this weapon of war called MATH to kids in grade school?!
Hell, if Hitler had just had better weather there's a good chance you'd all be speaking German right now. Those of you that survived, that is.
If he hadn't killed that butterfly as a five year old ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
TFA simplified the math a bit by showing how it would work if the numbers ran from 1 to N. But note earlier in the article it mentions that the allies had figured out the pattern of the serial numbers. There probably wasn't a German tank #1 or even #100; but there probably was a serial number that, based on their understanding of the information encoded in the serial number, the allies could estimate was the 100th built in a given timeframe (or perhaps at a given factory, etc.).
Starting at the 50th number in the sequence instead of the 1st wouldn't help much. Additional analysis could be done based on the density of the numbers seen to estimate upper and lower bounds.
What you might want to do is randomly skip numbers in your sequence with some predetermined frequency. You could either do this by a modest factor (to make the enemy over-estimate your production but in any event give them an upper bound) or by a wildly high factor (which would make it clear to your enemy that they are not getting useful information).
Or, you could use a protocol where the unique part of the serial number is actually random (provided you keep track to avoid two tanks getting the same value).
In summary - this works if the enemy hasn't thought about it or doesn't care.
It's not as simple as it might first appear. Tactically it's important to know where enemy concentrations are, Strategically it's important to bomb the factories where the tanks are being made. Germany built approx 50,000 armoured vehicles of all types during the war. For instance around 500 Jagd Panthers were constructed, not of them employed in the east. This intel wasn't necessarily available to commanders in the west - they wouldn't need to know anyway. A Stug III was as lethal to a Sherman as a Tiger or a Panther or Panzer IV. Stug III's were more plentiful than Tigers or Panthers So force composition becomes an a consideration. A Hertzer was a very capable little vehicle for instance and Stugs had a higher kill ratio than any other AFV of the war. Another consideration would be that there was nothing on the battle field that could penetrate the armour of a Tiger II (none has ever been recorded) although in theory a Stalin 2 with it's 122mm gun could have.
Watch those corners
Reminds me of the prank where you release 3 goats with the numbers 1, 2 and 4 on them and watch while everybody searches for the one with the number 3 on it.
I'm a programmer, I'd be looking for the one with number 8.
Was that Shermans were never intended to take on German Tigers/Panthers one on one. This comment is buried somewhere in his biography about WW II: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Bradley . Ike was pissed off when he learned that the latest Shermans, with the latest high velocity 76 mm were not enough to crack the German panzers, which were armed with 88 mm guns.
Bradley's book http://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-Story-Modern-Library-War/dp/0375754210 is interesting, and actually reads like a management text.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Cray's come with random serial numbers I am told.
Maybe, maybe not...
Germany was way behind on it's nuclear weapons program and it was so utterly demonized (perhaps rightly) by the Allies that they would in all likelihood not have hesitated to nuke the Germans to the negotiation table, if that had been necessary.
Also the first tank serial # should not be 1.
It wasn't. The article specifically states that they had to "deduce" the numbering scheme before they could make estimates. But most serial numbers have some sort of regularity - eg. 390817649 might mean tank number 649 assembled at factory 17 in August of 1939. The other guy was right - decent encryption would be the only way to stop the other side from being able to use serial numbers as an intelligence-gathering method.
No, see, you need to start the first few hundred with normal increasing numbers, then start incrementing by larger values, somewhat random each time. So they will find numbers equally distributed, and conclude that you're making many more than you really are.
A biologist, a physicist and a mathematician are visiting a foreign country. As they leave the airport in their car, they pass by a field, in which stands a single, black cow.
The biologist says, "How interesting. The cows in this country are black."
The physicist says, "You can't say that with certainty. All you can say is that they have cows in this country, and that at least some of them are black."
The mathematician says, "You can't say that. All you can say is that there is at least one cow in this country, and that at least one side of it is black."
Do I need to explain the relevance of this joke
Naw. The Russian front was important, but not necessarily because the Germans took such a beating there. The diversion of resources was enough to give the allies a chance at winning. If the invasion of Russia had gone more easily, the war might have stretched out longer and the allies might have suffered more casualties, but the end result would have been the same.
Of course, given the time-lines involved, the first nuke might have ended up being used over Berlin.
Na, use a randomly seeded short int.
Or better yet:
~/ openssl passwd
Password:
Verifying - Password:
xG54zqA2vYhSE
(That'd be the serial number for tank number "1". It'd make tracking your troop movements a real bitch.)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The system was used for something like sending pictures of suspected card counters and other cheats back and forth
Card counters aren't cheats, it's just that casinos don't like them because they do the same thing with skill that a casino does with manipulating the game. If anything, the casino is cheating.
Doubtful. The Germans could have expanded further. Maybe they even could have taken England and made headway towards Soviet oil fields, but the odds of them defeating (eventually) nuclear armed US and USSR at the same time seems pretty far fetched. And that isn't even counting Canada, the Aussies, etc. Too much land and too many people against them.
?
were people even worried about blood borne pathogens at the time? meaning did anyone worry about using sterilized tatoo needles during that time? or say sterilized syringes in military medical camps?
During and prior to World War Two, all military aircraft were assigned serial numbers by the Air Ministry. These comprised of one letter followed by four digits unit that sequence was exhausted in 1940, afterwards the code changed to two letters followed by three numbers. These numbers were painted on the sides of aircraft on a vertical surface, usually the rear of the fuselage. Different groups of letters were assigned to each service (RAF, Royal Navy, and from 1942 the Army Air Corps), often prior to production. However to make production numbers seem higher than they actually were, ranges of serial numbers assigned to particular projects often contained gaps which remained unused. These were known as Blackout Blocks. For example serial numbers for one batch of Spitfires produced in 1939 had serial numbers that went P8640-P8679, P8690-P8729, P8740-P8759 and P8780-P8799 with the rest unissued.
Anyone who has had their automobile subjected the to government run TÜV safety checks, before it was handed over to commercial German garages (and enormous difficulty to get a pass from a government TÜV) knows the real reason the German's lost the war. They could not get their tanks through the government run TÜV! :) :) :)
This sounds incredibly sensible.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
I like beach volleyball.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
1) md5 is a trapdoor, therefore there are many possible source values for any given hash value.
2) Given guids, good luck building a suitable lookup table.
1 and 2 stand independently of each other :)
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
WW2 German instructional films about destroying tanks, McGyver style, are on YouTube. It is quite impressive, how a well trained infantry could rip through unprotected tanks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLZKbD2Turo&feature=related
Of course the Soviets did not need movies for that, as this joke illustrates:
- Vasiliy Ivanovich, enemy tanks are attacking!
- Take the grenades from the shelf, Petka.
Some time later.
- Whew! We've beaten them back!
- Good, Petka. Now, put the grenades back to the shelf.
Churchill tanks are descended from "infantry" tanks, heavily armoured (for an Allied tank), slow moving and usually with a relatively small main cannon. Their primary function is to assist the infantry, not fight tanks and as such are next to useless against German heavy tanks such as the Panthers and Tigers. In fact, to the Germans, the Panther is a medium tank while the Western allies incorrectly classified it as a heavy tank and assumed that it was only present in small numbers, like the Tiger tanks. They paid dearly for this false assumption when Allied tanks were torn apart after the Normandy landings, like the in the battle of Villers-Bocage. You can read about it here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Villers-Bocage/. It was by using their superior numbers and a combined arms approach, especially fighter bombers that the threat of German tanks was beaten back. It was only until near the end of the European war that the Western allies fielded a tank that was on near equal terms with the Panthers and Tigers. Also, let's not forget that it was the Soviets who annihilated entire German field armies on the Eastern Front. If Hitler didn't fight a war on two fronts, the outcome of the Normandy landings, might have been different.
Why encrypt?
Isn't the purpose of a serial number to match up against a database? To know which parts were produced where to track down manufacturing problems and defects?
If the only purpose is tracking in a database, then encryption is not required. Just pick a random number between 1 and 9 billion, add a million, and there is your serial number. Make sure it is not already used, and add it to the database.
The security risk at that point is entirely at the database. Protect the database at the factory.
That's exactly why the Soviet Navy gave their ships non-sequential pennant (hull) numbers, and frequently re-assigned them. They would also sometimes paint one number on one side of the bow, and different on the other.
Security is a difficult business.
Intelligence can also be a weird business... I once read an account of how the CIA broke into a warehouse rented by the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City in order to examine (very closeup and very clandestinely) a high fidelity mock-up/prototype of a satellite the Soviets had on tour. The idea was to gather information on any real cable, connectors, or other hardware on the bird - as well as to collect any serial numbers, drawing numbers, etc.. that they could find. (It's not uncommon for such to contain 'real' items that have been discarded from production or operational use.)
You'd be surprised what a trained and knowledgeable analyst can derive from just a few seemingly unconnected bits of information.
Do I need to explain the relevance of this joke
Is that a statement or a question
From my experience, it's not the bad (database) programmers that are psychopathic ones.
They just bring out the psychopath in the poor sots that have to deal with their misbegotten travesties.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Well, I'm a C programmer. I'm looking for the number 0.
Ferry Porsche did this with his engineering/design business that eventually became a car company. First project was numbered as #7 since he didn't want his first client to think he was the first client.
As a note, Porsche model numbers are based on that number - the 356, the 744 transmission, the 901 and 902 (which became the 911 and 912 when Saab sued), etc.
No, it's impossible because production would have wrapped around to 0. They had teensy memory space back then.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
90% of winning a war is mastering logistics
Which is why Patton was such a pathetic general.
He destroyed the Allies logistics for his own personal fame, and when they finally broke under the strain he should've been annihilated by the German counter-attack.
Ironically he was saved by the incredible logistics handling and army maneuvering of General Montgomery, at least as much of a self-promoting publicity whore.
"One... Two... FOUR!"
"Five, sir!"
"... Three!"
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
I was thinking more along the lines of winter on the Eastern Front.
Neither. It's bait.
If the Nazis had taken Britain and the Caucasus, what do you think are the chances that the US would have tried to invade from across the Atlantic? It's one thing to island hop the Pacific; it's another to jump the entire Atlantic in one go.
This prank is usually performed in a high school, in order to annoy the administrators, not on the beach.
I've been telling people for years that WWII really came down to a battle of quantity over quality. Technologically, Germany was 10 years ahead of everyone else. Furthermore, their weapons were amazingly well-engineered. But they didn't have the facilities and infrastructure to produce in large quantities.
And that's what the USA had -- tons of natural resources, lots of factories, lots of fairly untouchable infrastructure with which to crank out a lot of weapons. Never mind the weapons were of inferior quality (i.e. The Sherman) we just had so many, we overwhelmed the Germans with the sheer number.
And what WWII American doughboy didn't desire a Luger pistol off any captured German soldier? That shows the quality of the German war machine, everybody wanted their stuff.
Witness how the American Forces and the Soviets were both racing to capture as much German technology as they could once it was clear the Nazis had lost the war. Both sides knew that the Germans were still, even as their empire fell, producing designs and weapons that were far in advance of what the allies could dream up.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Do I need to explain the relevance of this joke
Is that a statement or a question
Why are we here?
Genius. Actually, the wikipedia entry is far more interesting than that piece of crap. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
When hearing stories like these, you should keep some perspective and remember that the Germans had a superior tank-vs.-tank kill rate over the Allies. More so when you look at well-trained and equipped German tank units, many of which had kill ratios in the order of 10:1.
Also, Allied tankers where not by any means the first to use maneuver by weaker tanks to gain an advantageous position over more powerful tanks. The Germans did this many times in their 1940 invasion of France. The French and British had more powerful tanks (a few Allied medium tanks were more heavily armored than German heavy tanks!), but very few of them had radios. The German tanks were weaker, but most of them had radios. The Germans were much better able to coordinate their tanks, or change orders on the fly. And even then they had a tough time against Allied tanks.
(And no, I don't mean to imply that the Germans were the first to do this sort of trick.)
Are you adequate?
That's exactly why the Soviet Navy gave their ships non-sequential pennant (hull) numbers, and frequently re-assigned them. They would also sometimes paint one number on one side of the bow, and different on the other.
Sure, but that didn't have anything to do with any rational conception of security—it happened because the real number of the ship was so secret nobody was allowed to know it (not even the guy in charge of making up ship numbers) and the guy who painted the number on the left side of the ship wasn't allowed to know what the guy on the right side was painting, and vice versa. Security through complete paranoia—that was the Soviet way. That they completely confused themselves using such methods was deemed an acceptable risk, I guess.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
In other news:
Kids use math to count balloons in classroom. They counted 12 balloons on the teachers desk, and 7 in the ceiling. The counting was done by enumerating each balloon mathematically 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1=12, and 1+1+1+1+1+1+1=7.
Now the mathematical art of ADDITION was used to find the total balloons in the classroom. 12+7=19
Impressive students.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
You'd be surprised what a trained and knowledgeable analyst can derive from just a few seemingly unconnected bits of information.
So, don't leave us in suspense then. Tell us! What did they find?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
You could say the same for Napoleon.
So the real question is would you rather have German beers with an overbearing/racist gov't or fancy (and sometimes weird) French foods with snobby gov't?
Goats on the beach? Now you're just being ridiculous.
Yes. Ever heard of the butterfly effect?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
While knowing roughly how many enemy tanks are deployed is invaluable, it doesn't grant any immediate advantage in fighting one of them.
Subtracting the cool headline that seems to imply some kind of mathematics-based anti-tank death ray, we're left with the story that "the Allies used mathematical expertise to gather and analyse intelligence", which is cool but nothing surprising.
In the 80's I worked for a small (~ 40 person) software company. Back then all software was sold in boxes, with each box having a unique serial number.
The president of the company (I'll call him 'Richard', since that was his name) was sort of a nerd, and he liked to play head games. First, he bought one box / quarter from each of our competitors. From the (sequential) serial numbers, he could reliably estimate their sales rate. Also, all of our competitors started their serial numbers at 1, so he could estimate everyone's total sales.
Not satisfied at gathering intel on our competitors, Richard decided to plant some false intel of his own. Our serial numbers were strictly increasing, but they were not sequential. Richard could adjust the apparent sales rate of our product by choosing the interval between serial numbers. Also, the first box of each of our products was always serial #8386. And the first version of our products was always 1.4.
It is amazing what you can do with people's unstated assumptions about numbers. When a customer receives version 1.4, serial number 8386, he assumes that he has received a mature product. And when a competitor sees your serial number go from 8400 to 9000, he assumes you have sold 600 boxes.
I'm sorta glad that Richard wasn't a Nazi.
It's a simply ploy on misdirection. It's been around in one form or another for years. Back in grade school, we had word problems that played on this where we had to select the proper information to solve a math problem.
It can be done/demonstrated easier with coins and not harming any animals. Assemble 3 coins (US currency) a penny, a nickle, and a quarter.
Now tell them that Johny's mom had three kids. Point to the penny and say the name Penny, point to the nickle and say the name Nicolas, then point to the Quarter and ask what the third one's name is. Most people will spend a considerable time attempting to work quarter or some variation of it into a name even after repeating that Johny's mom had three kids. Eventually they give up.
(in case anyone is wondering, the third one's name if Johny- as in Johny's mom). It's a little easier then how far can a dog run into the woods.
As an online discussion about WW2 grows longer, the probability of the assertion that everybody would be speaking German without the intervention of American approaches 1.
Dude, no one will ever play with me!
Damm if I know. The account was written by one of guys doing the breaking in, not by one of the analysts.
Man, that flew right over my head.
I read somewhere (maybe Max Hasting's book on Winston's War) about a problem the British had with some infantry equipment getting wet and non-functional. They supposedly solved it by going to condom makers, who made a several foot long condom to fit over the gear and keep it dry.
When Churchill saw this, he said that it wouldn't do at all - he wanted each pack labeled "British Condom. Size - Medium."
They also tatooed the SS.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I am implementing this at my factory. In fact, tanks c4ca4238a0b923820dcc509a6f75849b, c81e728d9d4c2f636f067f89cc14862c, eccbc87e4b5ce2fe28308fd9f2a7baf3, a87ff679a2f3e71d9181a67b7542122c, and e4da3b7fbbce2345d7772b0674a318d5 just rolled off of the the assembly line.
It isn't going to help much if you post your production rate on Slashdot.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You expect this poor logistics officer to carry around a rainbow table with a few million entries?
Again... not all of them.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
That algorithm has a few collision attack, wouldn't 356a192b7913b04c54574d18c28d46e6395428ab , da4b9237bacccdf19c0760cab7aec4a8359010b0, 77de68daecd823babbb58edb1c8e14d7106e83bb be more secure?
And beware of bombers dropping pi from the heavens.
You asked for it. http://www.goatse.fr
The first nuke was slated for Japan as early as May 1943, though most of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project didn't know that. Whether that choice was due more to racism or to legitimate strategic concerns is an open issue.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Doesn't get you very far; the estimation algorithm is trivial.
Changing the starting number only changes the effective sample size by one.
I'm too tired by now, but your estimator is roughly along the lines of,
n=1: E[pop]=2*X1, where X1 = serial # of observed unit.
n=2: E[pop]=X1+X2
and the weights change from there. Converges blindingly fast.
When the numbers started at some large value as suggested, you really only burn one observation, the smallest, subtract it from the rest, and use the same algorithms.
oh, don't forget Canada.... *shudder*
http://www.motifake.com/image/demotivational-poster/0803/the-canadian-navy-canadian-navy-demotivational-poster-1207017857.jpg
'course, during WWII Canada WAS England pretty much....
Oh, for heaven's sake.
In 80's/early 90's, there was an option to have a "random" driver's license number instead of your social security number.
One day, a couple of folks who had a few beers noticed a couple of their licenses, and scratched their heads, and figured out the "encryption" algorithm. Social security number was doubled, and the last digit of the year of birth appended.
Also, In what would become the Dawson building, now the East India Building (or some such), Howard Hughes did indeed have a bottom floor office. And, yes, there was indeed a secret underground tunnel to the "house" across the street, which had an underground complex significantly larger than the house (thus the surprising number of air vents in a town where basements are rare due to geology).
Add in, at least according to Hardy Boys books, (very weak) checksums included included in the serial numbers of US currency, such that one digit can be determined from the rest on a real bill.
Mix these together, and it sure sounds like this technologically impossible rumored system.
In 1980, the mob still ran this town, and no such secret cooperation would have occurred.
By 1990, the mob was shattered, and it's remnants were comic relief (70 year old men on canes shooting other 70 year olds in their driveways [yes, seriously!]).
Actually, the math would still work, even when you don't know the lower bound.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
(in case anyone is wondering, the third one's name if Johny- as in Johny's mom). Actually old chap the 3rd child is named Quartermain...Johny was adopted!
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
I suggest you read (as a starter) Alan Clark's Barbarossa, which recounts how the Soviet Union was able to recover from the disaster of 1941, and includes detail on the rapid pace of Russian tank development during the war, and the German failure adequately to counter it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
$ for n in `seq 1 5`; do echo -n $n|md5sum;done
If only you'd used sha512sum instead, it would have been uncrackable.
German U-boats (submarines) were given deliberately 'inflated' numbers, to make it seem that there were many more than there really were. The strategic/morale effect of your enemy believing that you have hundreds of submerged threats at sea was an important consideration to the Germans.
I guess they didn't see the need to do this with tanks.
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
It's a little easier then how far can a dog run into the woods.
Well, the answer to that is obviously "Half way". After that it's running out of the woods.
ow tell them that Johny's mom had three kids. Point to the penny and say the name Penny, point to the nickle and say the name Nicolas, then point to the Quarter and ask what the third one's name is. Most people will spend a considerable time attempting to work quarter or some variation of it into a name even after repeating that Johny's mom had three kids. Eventually they give up.
(in case anyone is wondering, the third one's name if Johny- as in Johny's mom). It's a little easier then how far can a dog run into the woods.
Sigh.
The correct answer is that you don't have enough information to 100% determine the name. It does not say that Johnny's mother had ONLY three kids, it's quite possible Johnny is the fourth child, or that he is not her biological child.
As for the "How far can a dog run into the woods" The answer is not "halfway" as most people reason, there are multiple correct answers depending on how you read the sentence. For example, one correct answer is he can't, if you interpret "run into" as "impact". The question is rarely posed with the restriction of "assuming a perfectly circular forest", so without that clarification once again the only correct answer is "It cannot be determined with the data supplied". (if the forest is not circular and the dog changes direction partway it is possible to still be heading 'into' the forest yet cover more distance than the width of some parts of it.) Another item to consider in this case is that you're assuming the dog can run at all in the first place, or depending on the size of the forest you're assuming the dog isn't limited by distance or time.
The point of most of those types of questions is not actually to find a correct answer... in fact if they are posed properly there is not a single correct answer. Those types of mind games are used for psychological analysis of personality traits, they help determine how literal or creative a person is, how willing they are to conform to rules or to break them. They are also used as a mental exercise to try and encourage people to think outside the box.
However, in most classrooms you see them most commonly used as an exercise in sorting the relevant from the irrelevant information.
But in most classrooms, the teachers don't pose the question properly which just ends up confusing kids who have an ability to think critically.
I remember a teacher who gave us one such problem, it went something along the lines of "Farmer brown has 6 duck feet and 6 sheep heads. How many ducks are on Farmer Brown's farm?" The intention being that we were supposed to ignore the sheep heads as unnecessary information. My answer was "None. All he has is feet." and I was given an incorrect mark since the teacher wanted the answer of "three". Another student in my class was also marked incorrect, because she answered "No way to tell, we don't know if Farmer Brown is on his Farm or not, but we do know he has the feet. So it's either three or zero depending on where Farmer Brown is."
The type of misdirection problem you're thinking of would be a 'classic' like this: "If an electric train is traveling due east at 50mph and the wind is blowing west at 45mph, which direction does the smoke from the smokestack blow?" The answer being "None, it's an electric train & they don't have a smokestack". Or "If a rooster lays an egg on the peak of a roof, which side will it roll down?" The answer being "Roosters don't lay eggs". Or "If an airplane crashes on the border of the US and Mexico, in which country do you bury the survivors?" The answer is intended to be "You don't bury survivors".
Not to be confused with 'trick' questions, such as "Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?" Which is actually a double trick question since there are more remains than just Grant's, but the normal answer is "Nobody. You don't bury people in a mausoleum, you entomb them." Or "What color was George Washington's white horse?" The answer is not white, it's an equestrian insider joke because technically no horse is pure white unless it's an albino.
I am implementing this at my factory. In fact, tanks c4ca4238a0b923820dcc509a6f75849b, c81e728d9d4c2f636f067f89cc14862c, eccbc87e4b5ce2fe28308fd9f2a7baf3, a87ff679a2f3e71d9181a67b7542122c, and e4da3b7fbbce2345d7772b0674a318d5 just rolled off of the the assembly line.
Yes, it's a pity the Allies did not have access to Google.
If it does, you can at least estimate what amount of money is being printed secretly by the USA to keep the economy going.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I like watching beach volleyball. If you know what I mean, and I'm sure that you do.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"If an electric train is traveling due east at 50mph and the wind is blowing west at 45mph, which direction does the smoke from the smokestack blow?" The answer being "None, it's an electric train & they don't have a smokestack".
At my school the teacher would have amusingly omitted the fact that it was an electric train.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Hell, if Hitler had just had better weather there's a good chance you'd all be speaking German right now. Those of you that survived, that is.
And if the Spanish Armada had had better weather in 1588 the whole fucking world would probably be speaking Spanish.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
That's pretty much like a joke without the punchline.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You needed a lookup table to recognize those?
Plaintext: '1' : MD5 Hash: c4ca4238a0b923820dcc509a6f75849b
Plaintext: '2' : MD5 Hash: c81e728d9d4c2f636f067f89cc14862c
Plaintext: '3' : MD5 Hash: eccbc87e4b5ce2fe28308fd9f2a7baf3
It is unlikley that Germany could have taken England. Germany never well at amphibious operations and the Royal Navy pretty dang good as was the RAF at defense.
But if England did fall then Germany would have eventually faced B-29s and later B-36s from the US with nuclear weapons. Also we would not have had to stage across the entire Atlantic just from Iceland.
Plus the US would have had the option of working with South Africa and attacking from Africa across the Med.
So even with better weather in Russia things are not as clear cut as you would wee them. BTW it is a myth that the US was far behind Germany on swept wing research. The NACA was well long in that field as well and Lockheed had proposed a jet in 1940.
Now if Japan had attacked Russia on December 7th and not the US so Russia had to fight on two fronts and Germany had managed to keep the US out and if the UK signed an armistice with Germany then you have a strong maybe.
But those of us in the US and Canada would still not be speaking German.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Oops, I just thought of a major weakness:
Unless you use some heavily obfuscated system for generating serials(non sequential, starting from oddball offsets, etc.) it would likely be both conceptually trivial and computationally feasible for the enemy to do a guess and check attack:
If your spotter team sees a tank with a hex-encoded MD5 hash on the side, they have basically no way of converting that back to a serial. However, if you suspect that the serials start with 000001 and increment, or something, generating the first 10,000 MD5 hashes, and using OCR or even human labor against hashed serials seen in the field becomes quite simple.
It is functionally impossible to, given a set of captured hashes, reverse them into plaintext serials; but the set of plausible serials(particularly if you've captured a few samples from factories or spying operations or something) isn't all that huge, and most hashing operations are pretty cheap, especially on dedicated hardware, so it would not be difficult to guess a set of serials, hash them, and then check against hashed serials seen in the field.
And this is why they always tell you to leave crypto to the experts, I suppose...
Only if you're starting from one or a thousand. If your serials are nonconsecutive and are always huge numbers e.g.
45011962000782
(450119 = date, 62 = factory, 00078 is the serial [incremented by a random integer 1 = i = 9], 2 = check digit [sum(otherdigits) mod 10])
then the MD5's will effectively be white noise.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
True enough. If the serials are sufficiently large and non-obvious, MD5(or SHA1 or whatever, obviously I'm not making a specific algorithmic recommendation), will make them much more opaque at relatively low cost, and without bringing in high-value crypto keys to the system.
If the serials are too obvious, guess-hash-and-check becomes a viable strategy, which would not be true with proper encryption(but with proper encryption, "grab a low-level logistics operator and pull out his fingernails" would be; while with hashing it wouldn't...)
No, it's kinda the point of the whole article we're discussing here.
Here at the SIA (Slashdot Intelligence Agency), we patiently await 1679091c5a880faf6fb5e6087eb1b2dc.
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I'm Sarah Palin, I'd be looking for my ammo and a helicopter.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The .50 caliber heavy machine gun still being used in the US.
The Allies would probably have landed troops in Africa and moved north.