2010-06-15, 02:21 AM
In the section for things you like doing on Maplestory, they forgot the "L > g/f" and "L > b/f" options.
Making a few assumptions about how it works, the birthday thing could be very abusable. It probably only suggests friends within X years of yourself. It won't take people long to work out the value of X. So once you have X, you can then pick a user to target and keep entering in different birthdates for yourself to work out the boundary of where they do and do not appear in the results. Their birthday is that boundary +/- X, depending on which direction you were going. And finding the boundary is no big deal. Using a binary search style (Cutting the search space in half each time, direction depending whether or not you found them) is an O(log n) algorithm, which is VERY fast. So in this case, the log is base 2. So to calculate the number of attempts that should be required will be log[SIZE="1"]2[/SIZE](X*365) (Converting it into days as that is the finest unit of a birthdate). Lets say X is 5 years (Meaning friends will be within +/- 5 years of you).
log[SIZE="1"]2[/SIZE](5*365) = ~ 11
That means that with 11 searches, they could work out somebodys birthdate. Scary huh?
Common sense would say that they wouldn't implement it in the way that I have assumed due to the possible abuse, but would Nexon even think of this? They're stupid, they lack common sense. Unless it only takes into account birth year and not the exact birthday. But if that was the case, they wouldn't have fields for you to enter in your whole birthday... and they'd probably just ask for your age.
Making a few assumptions about how it works, the birthday thing could be very abusable. It probably only suggests friends within X years of yourself. It won't take people long to work out the value of X. So once you have X, you can then pick a user to target and keep entering in different birthdates for yourself to work out the boundary of where they do and do not appear in the results. Their birthday is that boundary +/- X, depending on which direction you were going. And finding the boundary is no big deal. Using a binary search style (Cutting the search space in half each time, direction depending whether or not you found them) is an O(log n) algorithm, which is VERY fast. So in this case, the log is base 2. So to calculate the number of attempts that should be required will be log[SIZE="1"]2[/SIZE](X*365) (Converting it into days as that is the finest unit of a birthdate). Lets say X is 5 years (Meaning friends will be within +/- 5 years of you).
log[SIZE="1"]2[/SIZE](5*365) = ~ 11
That means that with 11 searches, they could work out somebodys birthdate. Scary huh?
Common sense would say that they wouldn't implement it in the way that I have assumed due to the possible abuse, but would Nexon even think of this? They're stupid, they lack common sense. Unless it only takes into account birth year and not the exact birthday. But if that was the case, they wouldn't have fields for you to enter in your whole birthday... and they'd probably just ask for your age.