On Apr 25, 2005, at 12:41 PM, Maru Dubshinki wrote:
On 4/25/05, Warren Ockrassa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
So what would be the way to prevent that mapping from working? It
seemed obvious to me: A one-time pad. One-time pads are used to
scramble a coded message and are then discarded (hence their name);
with a genuine one-time pad encryption, a message is irretrievably
obfuscated. The only way to decrypt it is with a key, and if that key
is lost, so it the message, forever. This is because with a real
one-time pad any single character in the message could be replaced by
any other character. A note the length of this one would probably never
be deciphered, even if the universe lasts another fifty or so billion
years and there was an infinite number of compute cycles to commit to
its cracking.
Ehh. You are correct that no mathematical approach can break one-time pads, since there is no connection between symbols for the math to undo, but if you had an infinity computer (or a decent approximation), you could simulate all possible senders and receivers and break it that way.
OK, fair enough -- but how would that really supply you with an answer? If you simulated all senders and receivers, how would that be significantly different from the message content's encryption itself? You'd have a reduced range of possible transmitters, sure, but you'd still have a range of equally-likely interpretations, wouldn't you?
So the more I thought about that, the more it seemed that only people with actual organic abnormalities might be possessed of a different enough neural map that a Rosetta device couldn't "read" them. They'd have to be conscious, capable of more or less high function, but also organically variant. That pointed to schizophrenia.
The tragedy of it, of course, is that in such a future it's in
government and corporate interests *not* to treat or cure
schizophrenia. I love it when dilemmas like that get dropped in my lap;
they really punch up a story.
I'm afraid I'm not following why the schizophrenics would be unreadable: if 'Rosetta' is flashing all its inputs and storing the (arbitrary) responses, simply differing from other humans wouldn't make much difference, I would think- the differences could be as random as one pleases, and they would still be compensated for. Now, if the Rosetta's were working from a precomputed table of action/reactions to decipher the thoughts, then I could see why neurologically atypical individuals would be useful.
That's the idea, yeah -- there's basically a very large table of neural responses to stimuli, and as the patterns are matched the ways of reading those neurons become slowly more clear. It's based on a pretty big database; the only reason it takes a while to get a Rosetta translation to work is the human bottleneck. Sensations, images and so on have to be fed in and responses read, and that's what really takes the time.
But since schizophrenic brains are both nonstandard -- significantly deviant from the normative clusters Rosetta would already contain -- *and* (presumably) unique from one another, there's never been a way to pattern their neural responses to anything. In essence each set of responses in a schizophrenic brain comprises its own database entry in the set, with no correlates. So 100 such brains would equal 100 entries with no (or proximally no) cross-matching of patterns.
Perhaps the Rosettas could vary in capacity? Dumb, miniature ones working from hash tables, and expensive sophisticated realtime ones?
That's sort of how VR simulators work in the story. One of the characters gets a simulation game console and can't play it, because there's no basic map with which the simulator can work to feed in impressions.
A custom "translator" can be made that's keyed to the basic senses, something that lets the most fundamental aspects of a simulation function, but it's many orders of magnitude less complex than anything a Rosetta attempts, and it works (more or less) because things like sensory information, which is fed into the brain on a pre- or unconscious level, is easier to encode than something like a probe for a thought. Furthermore since the simulations aren't as interested in responding to conscious ideas, they don't need to receive -- just send.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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