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That's not how seeds work. Seeds are tiny.

Actually this would work perfectly if you knew it was generated in a single pass by a known random number generator and you had tons of time to brute force it.

If the file were generated by a natural source of entropy then forget it.

Or even if modified in a trivial way like adding 1 to every byte.

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crazygringo 15 hours ago | parent [-]

What is with the many downvotes but no comments? Everything I said is factual.

Seeds are something like 32 bits, though it depends on the exact implementation. But not the length of files.

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iforgotpassword 10 hours ago | parent [-]

When implementing a PRNG, you can make its seed as big as you want. There is no mathematical law that dictates or limits the size of a seed.

	▲	gus_massa 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		But I assume the GGP assumes that the author is lazy and used a public available PRNG instead of a custom made. (A long time ago someone broke the login security check in HN using a trick like that. Obviously, it's already fixed.)
	▲	crazygringo 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I mean sure you could in theory, but in practice that's not how common built-in random number generators work. I was responding to: > chances are the length of the seed is equal to the length of the original file And why would the chances be that? You'd really have to go out of your way for that. I don't even know if there are libraries that can handle a seed and state length on the scale of megabytes. No, chances are 99.99+% it used a seed of a few bytes, because that's how common random number generators designed for efficiency work.