briefly considering: how to tie a knot that cannot be untied wait, maybe we want our knots to be untieable! what about a special string from which every knot can be untied? topologists say a knot that cannot be untied is one tied in a loop such that manipulation of the loop does not relieve it — glueing the ends of your shoelaces together after tying them then an untie-able string might be capable of safely breaking and perfectly reconnecting to alleviate excess tangling how might we tie an untie-able knot in such a string? or, could a string be made such that all knots can be untied even when great effort is put in? given the assumption of everything being possible, we might consider making it most reasonable to permanently knot the string if severely excess resources were expended, such as assumptions in cryptography this would mean finding an area of the problem space where it is low-resource to free the string and high-resource to tangle it. for example, consider a string made of water. with water, the challenge is rarely loosening it — rather, the challenge is making it behave at all stringlike, and hold a shape at all, rather than flowing freely! [… we could consider locally freezing the water, perhap—