Guessing occurs on forced-choice (FC) tests for which responses cannot be based on relevant knowledge. Its importance is in inverse relation to the level of knowledge being measured, so that it becomes an increasing component of test scores as the level of knowledge decreases. It is also used as a benchmark to detect simulated impairment. This investigation examined the role of guessing in a 2-...

Guessing is an important component of everyday cognition. The present study examined the neural substrates of guessing using a simple card-playing task in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Subjects were scanned under four conditions. In two, they were shown images of the back of a playing card and had to guess either the colour or the suit of the card. In the other ...

The Shannon theory of cipher systems is combined with recent work on guessing values of random variables. The security of encryption systems is measured in terms of moments of the number of guesses needed for the wiretapper to uncover the plaintext given the cryptogram. While the encrypter aims at maximizing the guessing effort, the wiretapper strives to minimize it, e.g., by ordering guesses a...

A coupling of two distributions PX and PY is a joint distribution PXY with marginal distributions equal to PX and PY . Given marginals PX and PY and a real-valued function f(PXY ) of the joint distribution PXY , what is its minimum over all couplings PXY of PX and PY ? We study the asymptotics of such coupling problems with different f ’s. These include the maximal coupling, minimum distance co...

In the secure communication areas, three-party authenticated key exchange protocol is an important cryptographic technique. In this protocol, two clients will share a human-memorable password with a trusted server, in which two users can generate a secure session key. On the other hand the protocol should resist all types of password guessing attacks. Recently, STPKE’ protocol has been proposed...