D049 - crack: a hit is proof and a miss is nothing

Status: decided Date: 2026-09-26

obscene-tool crack recovers names by hashing candidates against identifiers. A match is reported as certain; a non-match is reported only as "not in the candidate list", with the number of candidates tried. --known measures how many established pairs the candidate generator reproduces before its misses are weighed.

Why: the hash is one way, so a miss says nothing about whether a name exists. A generator that cannot regenerate known names is not ready to be believed about unknown ones.

Rejected: reporting misses as absences - turns "we did not guess it" into "it is not there".