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The kappa value is used in a way that's effectively correct, but is a theoretical atrocity #5

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BenH11235 opened this Issue Dec 24, 2018 · 0 comments

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BenH11235 commented Dec 24, 2018

(See reddit comment by /u/hiles)

We want to aim for the decryption to approximate the assumed distribution of the plaintext. What we actually do when choosing the key length is hunting for the largest kappa value, which means that implicitly, we are aiming for the decryption to approximate a degenerate distribution (100% chance of some outcome X) instead.

The result is the same, since while a wrong key length can produce something closer to a degenerate distribution than the plaintext distribution, the probability for this to actually happen with typical problem parameters is less than the probability that I have an aneurysm and die before I manage to hit "submit". But admittedly, that's no excuse.

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