I'm having some trouble with this scenario, some advice would be great. The context is that a group of people have each been give a simple 5 letter word - for example:
- Alice: ACTOR
- Bob: JEANS
- Dan: SAUCE
- Erin: ACTOR
- Fred: RELAX
How could a person within the group identify whether or not another member has the same word as them, without sharing the word itself? Is this even possible? My first instinct was to use some kind of hashing algorithm, but that would be simple to brute force. Is there some kind of neutral web service out there that could facilitate this?