EE Times, Aug 9, 1993, p. 31 reports that "MIT's Research Lab of Electronics is creating new signal processor designs, based on chaos theory, that could open up a simple route to secure communications. The new designs use a recent discovery called synchronized chaos to transform a meaningful signal into what only seems to be random noise., A similarly constructed receiver responds to the noisy signal, sychronizing its own chaotic behaviour to extract the message. The MIT design requires only eight op-amps and is based on the Lorenz attractor, which generates a simple three-dimensional chaotic system." There's more, this is just a pointer. Their current encryption system is analog, not digital, and encrypts analog signals like audio; I don't know if this is a fundamental design property or not. They claim it's not super-great encryption, just cheap and interesting. Wired Sep/Oct 93 also reports (p.118) a Sep 9-12 conference on "Fluctuations and Order" at Los Alamos National Labs' Center for Nonlinear Studies. "The labs are gathering a couple dozen researchers who have realized they can induce order into systems by using noise and randomness. As one abstract says, `The addition of noise to certain types of driven systems can paradoxically cause a signal to become clearer.'" These seem related, to me. John