John Nash received his Nobel Prize for work he did as as a graduate student and post-doc. There were a couple of results he found that comprised his PhD thesis and another paper. He didn't actually work in the finance industry -- they took his work and applied it for their own purposes. So using him as a example of research coming out of the sector is a non sequitur.

The tech's still a bit flaky on the reading side if you have more than just a couple of pieces of information, however. JWZ did some investigating into this late last year and came away disappointed. I'm sure it will slowly improve over time, but it's nowhere near Just Works yet: See his results for more details.

It also doesn't have plausible deniability any longer. A union leader or employer or gangster who has some hold over somebody can force them to prove their vote was cast in the pre-agreed fashion: the person has to show that their session id, name, result and what they claim is their key matches up with the hash. They can't fake the key, since creating a hash collision on demand for a pre-specified hash is still a hard mathematical problem. They have to know the session id, otherwise there's no verifiability even for the voter.

There have been schemes created that allow verifiability along with deniability , but they are complex and expensive (in physical equipment terms) and I don't think I can recall one that allows over-the-internet voting (i.e. not being present at a specially constructed voting machine).

I remember reading about Huffman encoding back in high school and it is probably largely responsible for me moving on from "computers as a game thingie" to "computers as something to program". The following is my recollection of how this term paper came about - although the details may be a little wrong, since the articles where I've read it are in boxes in the garage and I can't be bothered going down to hunt them out at the moment. :-)

Anyway, just thought I'd share my memories about them man.

Huffman and a few others were taking a graduate course from a professor who gave them a choice about how to be assessed. Either they could sit an end-of-term exam (there may have been some assignments involved throughout the semester as well), or they could write a term paper. Each student could make their own choice.

Most of the class members chose the end-of-term exam, but Huffman (he admitted later) was a slightly lazy student and so decided on the term paper, thinking he could knock it off in a couple of weeks and get an easy credit. Unfortunately (for him, luckily for computer science) he kept putting off the work and suddenly realised he was running out of time to write the paper and couldn't even think of a topic. To make matters worse, he had missed (or not concentrated in) so many of the lectures that the option of renegging and doing the exam was no longer really open to him.

In desperation, he asked the professor for a suggested topic. The professor (I wish I knew his name - he deserves a place in history as well!) posed a problem about compressing data. Huffman struggled with the topic for quite a while but eventually (quite close to the deadline, IIRC) came across a very elegant solution that worked beautifully. He was even able to prove that his solution was optimal, in the sense that no better byte-by-byte compression method was possible (this doesn't include things like LZW, etc, which use run-length compression techniques).

The rest, as they say, is history. As an aside, Huffman passed the course with top marks, since the professor had neglected to inform Huffman that he (the professor) and a colleague had already put extensive work into the problem and failed to solve it satisfactorily.

Just goes to show, sometimes the best work *is* done under pressure. :-)

(OK, let the error-pointer-outers go to work. Where did I mess up?)