There is a danger with publishing hashes that you might publish opposite ones. Ideally, you should be committing to one answer or the other. High entropy predictions mitigates against this, but the effect is still there. And we can’t tell if it’s high entropy until it is revealed. Publishing dates mitigates against this.
I thought I recently saw an essay on the uses of hash precommitments, including this kind of problem. If that doesn’t ring a bell, I guess it wasn’t by you.
Oh. Yeah, I did start a little discussion on an isomorphic trick in Umineko. In this case, the date on which I posted the hash is provided automatically by Reddit/Lesswrong/Twitter/etc and one can also verify I didn’t post any other hashes recently to those fora.
The trick also only works for ‘small keyspaces’, if you will—if for example I was trying to fake a precommitment to a 100-digit number, the trick isn’t going to work because it’s not feasible to publish precommitments to even a tenth of the potential 100-digit numbers without people noticing and calling foul - ‘so, gwern, why are you publishing that many precommitments and when can we expect them all to be revealed...?’
There is a danger with publishing hashes that you might publish opposite ones. Ideally, you should be committing to one answer or the other. High entropy predictions mitigates against this, but the effect is still there. And we can’t tell if it’s high entropy until it is revealed. Publishing dates mitigates against this.
I thought I recently saw an essay on the uses of hash precommitments, including this kind of problem. If that doesn’t ring a bell, I guess it wasn’t by you.
Oh. Yeah, I did start a little discussion on an isomorphic trick in Umineko. In this case, the date on which I posted the hash is provided automatically by Reddit/Lesswrong/Twitter/etc and one can also verify I didn’t post any other hashes recently to those fora.
The trick also only works for ‘small keyspaces’, if you will—if for example I was trying to fake a precommitment to a 100-digit number, the trick isn’t going to work because it’s not feasible to publish precommitments to even a tenth of the potential 100-digit numbers without people noticing and calling foul - ‘so, gwern, why are you publishing that many precommitments and when can we expect them all to be revealed...?’