[Labs-l] Down to the millisecond

Fri May 27 15:29:23 UTC 2016

Okay let me explain: we want to create a tie-breaker mechanism for ties in
elections. My idea is that if we have two people who tie, we will have our
local election representative make a null edit in a designated page. Then
we will use the right-most digit of the timestamp as a psuedorandom number,
and use it to break the tie (if it is odd, the first person wins, if even
the second person wins). The problem is you can plan your edit such that
it'll happen on an even or odd second. It is hard, but possible.

Rev ID is a good idea. Are there any other such pseudorandom numbers you
can think of?

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 9:55 PM, Platonides <platonides at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 27/05/16 00:18, Huji Lee wrote:
>
>> Actually no, turns out Rand also uses seconds (not milliseconds) and can
>> be gamed.
>>
>> Sorry, will stop spamming now. Please advise!
>>
>
> If you want more precision, you could use the revision id.
> What are you trying to do and why/how would people want to game it?
>
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