it feels incredibly trippy to be reading about quantum physicists (an evil science) using group theory (a lovely beautiful field misused by the horrors) to do just their normal average everyday sort of evil as opposed to the horrors
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@hipsterelectron I am an evil scientist muahhahahaha
@jackielovescompchem32 you can do evil science without being evil. but you can also be evil without being bad
@jackielovescompchem32 i like lenstra's and schoof's papers a lot even if they specifically focus on factoring methods and the hellman paper where he advises the use of a prime q = 2p + 1 was also doing some evil math but it was necessary to demonstrate the good math
@jackielovescompchem32 i wonder whether/how slight deviations from periodic standing waves might manifest in quasiperiodic or intermittently high-period behavior. i suppose that would largely agree with the periodic-as-discrete view by e.g. briefly introducing the next largest prime factor
so i'm learning that neural nets are also precisely the kind of thing you would create to calculate discrete logs
also learning that the guy stallman fell over himself to defend against any allegation was potentially the most average MIT "AI" loser ever
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky
While working at Bell Labs in 1952, Minsky proposed a design for a useless machine he called the "ultimate machine". When switched on, a device emerges from it to switch it back off. Claude Shannon, Minsky's mentor at the time, built the first working prototype.
@hipsterelectron
I wanted to defend the Useless Box, but I'll take “Death of the Author” for $100.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky#Association_with_Jeffrey_Epstein
@dzwiedziu i cannot possibly express enough that this is a frighteningly recurrent theme among evil cryptographers
![[object Object]](https://media.mas.to/accounts/avatars/109/287/758/133/964/366/original/0f3099c0adfb36a0.png "[object Object]")
@hipsterelectron I’m learning a lot about John McCarthy lately and it’s really not looking good for the “you can’t say all AI is bad” people
@zzt yeah just flip the classifier 1 - Bad(AI) = oh huh i've never seen it produce that many zeroes without a decimal point before
@zzt @hipsterelectron “McCarthy spent most of his career at Stanford University.” Is all you need to know about him really
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_Neural_Analog_Reinforcement_Calculator
hmmmmm
Prompted by a letter from Minsky, George Armitage Miller gathered the funding (a few thousand dollars) for the project from the Office of Naval Research of the U.S. Department of Defense in the summer of 1951 with the work to be carried out by Minsky, who was then a graduate student in mathematics at Princeton University.
GRADUATE STUDENT IN MATHEMATICS AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
like this is so much more likely to be a cryptanalytic hardware module. in 1951???? that was barely out of world war 2. i don't know why that would need to be hidden
this is from the princeton dean in question and he specifically said einstein disproved this prof's theory about planetary orbits like that was einstein's fault. princeton is so bad dude this is like a parody
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He was an expert in mass spectrometry by which isotopes of an element could be separated according to their mass but not by any chemical means as they are chemically identical. A typical mass spectrometer consists first of a source in which the sample is ionized so that it has a charge and can be accelerated to form a beam. This beam is directed into a perpendicular magnetic field, which makes the constituent particles move in a circular path. The radius of the circle depends on the particle mass, so that the lighter ones move in a smaller circle than the heavier ones and are thereby separated.
he goes into this incredibly lengthy description of all the parts of the mass spectrometer except the one i care about which are the mechanisms to record ion counts since that's the one that lies to you and only returns an opaque statistical estimation
you can't possibly pretend to be a physicist and act like the part where it counts single fucking electrons isn't the coolest shit ever. we were going to start writing our own analyses at the cancer lab if we were able to get access to the counters
oh he made a corporation selling mass spectrometers no wonder he wouldn't mention that bit
he studiously avoids ever explaining any of the electron/ion measurement devices. what a strange quirk
oh my god dude this is in the new yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i
I have known Minsky for more than thirty years. When I first met him, in the late nineteen-forties, at Harvard, it was not entirely clear what his major academic field was—or, perhaps, what it wasn’t. He was taking courses in musical composition with the composer Irving Fine. Although he was an undergraduate, he had his own laboratories—one in the psychology department and one in the biology department—and he was writing what turned out to be a brilliant and original senior mathematics thesis on a problem in topology.
i can't fucking believe this i didn't think he would actually be so radioactively obviously doing evil mathematics
i'm gonna find his thesis
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/321328.321337?download=true
Unrecognizable Sets of Numbers (1966)
and he literally cites our boy rabin too
The technique described in this note enables one to show that certain sets cannot be recognized by finite state automata
GOD FUCKING DAMN IT IS THAT WHY AUTOMATA THEORY SUCKS TOO
We consider here only the binary representation, so as to avoid pompous statements, but the same results can be obtained for any radix by changing all 2’s to r’s in the sequel. We warn readers not to confuse the statement that the primes written in binary form are not a regular set with the trivial statement that the set of strings of prime length is not regular.
this is just the discrete log problem?????
If
a_nis of odd length,2k+1, it has the forma_n = b_n 2^{k+1] + d 2^k + b_n, wheredis0or1.
this also gives the q = 2p + 1 relation??? this is also an actual analysis of the appropriateness of discrete log as a CSPRNG???
this is the author credited with simultaneous discovery of the discrete log CSPRNG? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobham%27s_theoremQ
this is his discrete log paper https://sci-hub.red/storage/moscow/658/cd1020ccc6e42c54cacbcdacde0be189/cobham1969.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobham's_thesis it's really fascinating too that the other 1974 phd thesis from dillon came about (as best i can tell) from digital multichannel radio transmissions in which one desired a long carrier wave (i think lengthier waves let you fit more channels in or something?) anyway that thesis was the first time i'd seen a fourier transform expressed as a matrix which recorded the frequencies of each cyclic subgroup and it all worked in the integers because it was (mod m)
and then the author was explicitly like ok JUST for this one bit i'm not gonna be looking at this as a number but JUST as a function operating upon a string of bits (i.e. a bit vector with independent components) and i was like ohhhhhh sick and he was like yeah we're seeing what the cardinality is or whatever
i often find matrices terribly aggravating when they look like assigned work even if i really like drawing my little number friends in their little n x m box houses looking out their little windows
it was really cute and fun to read too. he would always have these adorable little adjectives preceding statements he was proud of https://drum.lib.umd.edu/items/d8150b1f-1bdd-4c3d-9987-c14a95251edc absolutely ace mathematician vibes
he did in fact thank the department of defense (Thank you Meta!)
but i had absolutely zero group theory background before reading and it's just. when someone is clearly writing with clarity and expertise and empathy you just get the hang of it pretty quick. and like observe too the author's application of jargon (he uses it: that is to be expected from a dissertation) and how different it is from when someone invokes jargon to signal
this really was so much like how my parsing work had turned out. now just gotta focus in on phd apps and spin a tale about filesystems crypto and i/o
