Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The Birthday Problem, as it is known, has sqrt(N) as an approximate answer to get a 50% chance of a clash.

So 16 million devices.



Yep - the chance of any collisions at all, vs the chance of a collision with _your_ specific device/MAC.

That does though drop the chance of any collision at all (aka the birthday paradox) of devices discriminated solely by the 24 bit device identifier down to sort(2^24) which is only 4096. A significantly smaller number than I expected...




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: