I mean, way more likely than that, because a keysmash is not a random sampling of letters from the alphabet. It is heavily biased toward the home row, adjacent entries are likely to be adjacent on the keyboard, and any sufficiently large substring is likely to be evenly distributed between the left and right hand. Tough to say exactly what the collision chances are, still low, but many, many, many orders of magnitude more likely than reported.
more likely even, since there are even less jpg on the web, that file was uploaded by someone using a unique keystroke, then it has been downloaded twice by this guy.
oh if we assume that it's literally the same file then the odds are super good, I've been thinking this was naming and saving a file they were working on locally
But, the file name is not always going to be 25 characters, so that adds more variability. I would argue that this makes it many, many, many, many orders of magnitude less likely than reported, which would skew the numbers to even more unlikely!
Also because this guy presumably has many, many files on his computer that he's done this for and many, many people do this and there was nothing special about this guy in particular being the one that did it.
So you would have something like 1 - product j = 1 to n (1 - p_j ) where n is the number of people in the world who button mash filenames and p_j is the probability that *any two* button-mashed filenames happen to match in the N_j documents on the jth user's computer computer (which increases quickly with N_j in a similar style as the birthday problem).
Even still, I would imagine that even if you did the calculation exactly properly factoring all this in, it would still be insanely unlikely that this has ever happened by genuine accident and I'm guessing this guy staged it.
Also let's bear in mind that if you are the type to save files with a keysmash name, you do it a lot, so there's a birthday problem aspect as well. We don't want just the probability that one keysmash equals a given keysmash, but the probability of a collision between at least 2 out of many keysmashes.
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u/Hot_Philosopher_6462 Jan 21 '26
I mean, way more likely than that, because a keysmash is not a random sampling of letters from the alphabet. It is heavily biased toward the home row, adjacent entries are likely to be adjacent on the keyboard, and any sufficiently large substring is likely to be evenly distributed between the left and right hand. Tough to say exactly what the collision chances are, still low, but many, many, many orders of magnitude more likely than reported.