LP+Apologies if I repeat a question which has already been answered. +My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive, and I miss many +important postings. Some time ago it was asked why Vernor Vinge +made passing reference to humans' naivete in trusting public key +encryption, and some posters were seeking to contact professor +Vinge for clarification. Has any further explanation been +discovered for his distrust of PKE?
I once had a girlfriend who factored five digit numbers just by looking at them. "29367? No, that's not prime. It's 117 times 251..." Good ol' Elizabeth. That's what you get for an "IQ" of around 175. Surely there might be higher "IQ's" someplace else in Universe?
Albert Szent-Georgi once told me his thought that an IQ difference of thirty points meant that one person solves by inspetion problems which no amount of explanation can make clear to the other. He added that in a normal day we run into people spanning three such gulfs.
If an IQ of 100 routinely factors two digit decimal numbers, and you get another digit for every twenty or thirty points, then you're looking for beings with IQ's in the 1,000 range to factor 100 digits binary...
There is a class of people called "idiot savants" who contain people who can also solve such problems by inspection - their IQs are often much lower than 100, so that blows Albert's theory. These so-called "idiot savants" can easily factor 100 digit numbers. The ability to solve such problems is not tied to IQ, as there are many such people with IQs of 150+ who cannot solve them. -- Ed Carp, N7EKG Ed.Carp@linux.org, ecarp@netcom.com 801/534-8857 voicemail 801/460-1883 digital pager Finger ecarp@netcom.com for PGP 2.5 public key an88744@anon.penet.fi ** PGP encrypted email preferred! ** Cop: "How many beers have you had tonight, bro?" Suspect: "Seventy." -- from the TV show "Cops"