Question

I was going through Andrew NG’s machine learning course. I am still at the beginning stages.
With his housing price prediction example in the class he teaches Supervised learning.

Is it possible predict the RSA token which will be generated next after providing a dataset of “right” values for the machine learning program? Can we use supervised learning to make the program learn the algorithm?

Answer 1

It won’t work.

An RSA token creates a psuedo-random sequence of numbers from a seed.

In theory, if you had infinite resources then you could train an algorithm long enough that it “learnt” the entire sequence of pseudo-random numbers. And then you could predict the sequence (and potentially even infer the seed) from a set of previous values.

In practice this approach is guaranteed to fail because both:

• The training time would be too long for this to be feasible.
• The size of solution required (e.g. the number of parameters in a neural network) would be too large to be implemented.

By “too large” and “too long” you should understand “longer/larger than anyone in the universe will ever be able to achieve”.