On Wed, 1 Jan 2003, Michael Cardenas wrote:
People do break cyphers, by finding weaknesses in them. Are you saying that you think that current cyphers are unbreakable?
People break cyphers by 1) cryptoanalysis (mostly brain, a bit of muscle) 2) brute force (no brain at all, pure muscle) So far we've been talking purely brute force here. It is easy to see that a current cypher requiring a 10^6..10^9 computer-years brute force can be broken in realtime if attacked by a massively parallel molecular electronics computer common several decades downstream. It is trivial to design cyphers running on today's hardware which would be safe from that attack. No one is doing that because you want speedy encryption on today's software. And secrets become stale quick. The quantum computer is a dark horse, because no one really knows how much quantum parallelism you can extract from a given pile of molecules. Plus, not all algorithms can be mapped to a QM machine. It also seems that entanglement is energy bound, but the field is still moving far too quickly to say anything meaningful.
Also, what about using biological systems to create strong cyphers, not to break them?
Molecules are molecules. Solvated linear biopolymers are lousy computers in any case. So are 5-qubit QM machines which require an NMR machine, for that matter. Whether classical, or QM, it has better be solid state, and preferrably not require mK environment to run.
It seems that all of these analyses assume that an instruction is a single mathematical operation in a turing machine. What if each operation was something else? I refuse to believe that the human mind is just a turing machine.
The human mind is not a Turing machine. But a Turing machine is an all purpose computational device, so in principle it can simulate relevant aspects of physical system evolution. Including the spiking, diffusion, genomic activity networks in each cell and god knows what else in the physical system residing between your ears. Meaning, a suitably constructed machine could be intelligent. It can be even you if you keep your and its state synched.