Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
No points for mentioning the old prank of labeling $looseAnimal 1, 2, 3, and 5.
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
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 know who else was able to estimate the number of German tanks?
SSC
I am implementing this at my factory. In fact, tanks c4ca4238a0b923820dcc509a6f75849b, c81e728d9d4c2f636f067f89cc14862c, eccbc87e4b5ce2fe28308fd9f2a7baf3, a87ff679a2f3e71d9181a67b7542122c, and e4da3b7fbbce2345d7772b0674a318d5 just rolled off of the the assembly line.
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.
256 tanks per turn? Impossible! That would take a regular supply of 1280 IPCs...
The mistake they made was looking at middle manager numeric metric goal achievements. Anyone in modern corporate America knows it possible to generate amazing numbers, yet not really accomplish anything.
I have faith they were meeting the appropriate metric goals at a 1400 tanks/month pace for diversity training, staff meetings, coffee consumption, memos distributed per week, slashdot first posts, etc, yet at the same time have faith that they only shipped like 5 working tanks out the door.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I don't know. If the CIA secretly operated reconnaissance satellites before they were actually invented, the certainly would have deserved a large chunk of the intelligence budget.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
NO CARRIER
Yup. That's the Nazis in WW2 alright.
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
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065938/
Is your dad's name Sgt. Oddball ? :)
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
the only information needed to make this mathematical method work is that the serial numbers be sequential. As in auto-incrementing. Which is not data in a serial number.
but nevermind the facts, let us reconsider instead the choice to use or not to use 'intelligent' serial numbers back in 1942. Because it matters.
The world must know if the Nazi were bad database designers as well as genocidal sociopaths. Possibly the two are causal? No? Well, It was a theory.
Maybe some of the tradeoff costs have changed in the last sixty years or so? Maybe the costs of data storage or data retrieval have changed?
We'll never know. Hitler took the master copy of the Nazi database normalization guidelines into that bunker with him and they were never seen again.
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.
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
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);}
I don't know about you, but when I come across really poor database design, sometimes I feel like murdering a few million people.
Who knew? Hitler was just mad about their database design.
Well, I'm a C programmer. I'm looking for the number 0.
You would get collisions, is why. Very dumb idea.
So what? If you're tank can't take a few collisions, then you've got serious problems.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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."
I like how the wikipedia article specifies that this math problem is known as the German Tank Problem in the *English-speaking* world. Apparently, the math worked.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.