Last year alone four people died in the US while playing the game. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/05/dion-von-mays-dies-...

Combining this with the 1 in 600 statistic of the grandparent comment, it seems like ~2000-3000 people played Russian Roulette last year. To me, that's even more astounding than the number of deaths -- although the number of deaths is certainly more tragic.

That's a pretty big leap of faith assumption though. Does anyone have a source or a revolver?

I have spun a revolver with one round in the cylinder. First, you wont wait for it to settle, so it doesn't matter. Second, a cylinder is pretty heavy, so even if you did, it's not that big an effect. Third, there is significant friction between the cylinder and the pin it rotates on, which will prevent it from settling in that manner. The 1:600 number isn't true.

Even if the 1/600 estimate(which I'm skeptical of) is correct, it wouldn't translate to that many people having played, but that many trigger pulls.

I think it's more likely that someone who plays once will play multiple times than it is for someone who has never played to start.

That's assuming that everyone who dies from playing it only played it once. It could be that only 4 people played it at all, and they all played it ~600 times.

Incredible.

Shors algorithm also breaks elliptic-curve cryptography.

Oh, wow, I've never seen the variant that breaks ECC; that's really quite awesome. Time to read some papers!

Nielsen, Michael A.; Chuang, Isaac L. Quantum Computation and Quantum Information. p. 202 is what you want ;)