At 4:04 AM 11/28/95, Thaddeus J. Beier wrote:
I am curious on whether there are any applications of the directed Hamiltonian path problem to cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, etcetera. My reaosn for asking is that I've come across something in my field (molecular genetics) that can be used to solve such problems in a couple of weeks or so. -Allen
Secret sharing can be done by Hamiltonian paths. No public key code has been found to take advantage of those, or any other NP complete problem, so far as I know. DNA computing really doesn't solve the Hamiltonian graph problem, it just makes the biggest one that you can solve a little bit bigger. 500 point graphs remain insoluble (pun unitended) for earth-sized vats of DNA.
Really.
Thaddeus beat me to the punch, as I was going to say just about the same thing. The work by Adleman on "vats of computers" is intriguing, but is no real solution to the problem of exponential or superexponential growth: a problem that Adleman's vat could solve with a fish tank full of DNA computers in a day could be easily outpaced by a key length "only" a bit longer. Check the archives for many articles on this topic. Also, check the Web search engines for conferences, papers, etc. on this. --Tim May Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."