@SqueamishOssifrage Sorry, too low quality for it to be migrated.
I've closed it down though. I didn't act on your flag of a particular comment by editing it or deleting it, so I had to dismiss it. I did place a warning comment below it though.
I'm taking a quantum computing course in which, for our final project, we must create a proof-of-concept implementation of Grover Search for finding hash collisions up to a difficulty (similar to blockchain).
I need a (relatively) simple hash function. As this will be running on a quantum simula...
When I think about answering this I keep finding things that are wrong. Every reasonable guess at what was actually meant has something else wrong with it. All of those also have things wrong with them. A lot of 2nd order plausible reinterpretations still have things wrong with them.
It's a homework related question. What do you think is wrong with it?
Did the guy misinterpret his assignment? Does the instructor not understand the subject he created an assignment for?
Did the entire class get this assignment? Or did he propose this as a final project idea? Or pull a project out of a hat.
Oh. Maybe the assignment is meant to get students to implement BHT and the proof of work part isn't the real exercise students are meant to do.
Depending on the instructor the proof of work part might just be there to make the assignment more interesting, or to paint the main part of the assignment as having real world applications, or it could be obfuscation mixed into the problem because the professor thought it was otherwise too easy.
I've met a guy that liked to make students do extra work. He handed out source code we were supposed to use as a base (because most people had zero programming knowledge) with a really subtle one liner hidden in it that broke the code only when you got to the end of the assignment.
The only hint was a needle cryptic comment in a haystack of useless cryptic comments.
I've met/heard of some terrible instructors as an undergrad. Some I took classes with, some I overheard, some that friends had. Cruel ones, insecure ones, incompetent ones, and a political science teacher that told his students that he didn't like primaries or US senate elections. And that positions like that should be filled by appointment or decided by party leaders.
Too negative, too rambley... I've got serious respect for the math, comp sci (minus that one guy, an engineer teaching coding to outside majors), and physics people. And I'm not complaining about the question's OP. I'm just confused by it.
The question may be off topic. Grover's search isn't necessarily crypto. I don't any of us know enough in the intersection of quantum computing and software engineering to give a solid answer. I think a plain insecure hash would work for homework and proof of concept.
I don't think it is too bad, certainly not bad enough to be closed. Yeah, sometimes I really wonder from what thought the poster comes from and how the hell he got there. However, even clueless people are welcome to get one :)
I just noticed that we the following pair of seemingly duplicate tags:
hybrid currently has 20 questions, and a tag wiki that says:
Something of mixed origin. In cryptography, typically a cipher system containing both public key and secret key component ciphers, where the public key system ...
When I used to teach grad classes, I often had open questions that were vague. If the students did something interesting, I often sent them somewhere with funding to look into it. It was a good way to find out what people were into. "Make me an ADC that always violates Heisenberg's uncertainty principle".
I get the vibe that there's a lot of crypto profs that do the same thing.
@FutureSecurity Maybe you could have asked a question for clarification? You seem awfully angry about the homework problem of a pseudonymous stranger on the internet. (It seems likely to be moot now that the asker has accepted an answer and moved on.)
@bdegnan Open ended questions aren't bad. :) Good if you tell the students they need to be creative, do research, and that there are multiple answers. Bad if you mislead students, don't tell them that what they've learned in class shouldn't be sufficient to answer the question, have no idea what to expect yourself, or severely underestimate how much time it will take.
Lol, someone anonymously edited `You guys are losers too` into this [question](https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/40748/why-we-need-to-use-a-modulus-in-public-cryptography) We are all losers :)
I just noticed that we the following pair of seemingly duplicate tags:
hybrid currently has 20 questions, and a tag wiki that says:
Something of mixed origin. In cryptography, typically a cipher system containing both public key and secret key component ciphers, where the public key system ...
