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You make these inbred parent seeds sound like private keys in encryption. You jealously guard them, you combine them to create offspring (public keys) which yo
by stephengillie 11y ago
You make these inbred parent seeds sound like
private keys in encryption. You jealously guard them, you combine them to create offspring (public keys) which you freely distribute without worry, and lots of people are trying some arcane process to deduce your exact secret.
- btown 11y agoI think you mean public keys in the second sentence, but if so, that sounds like a very apt analogy.
- stephengillie 11y agoYes I did, and thank you.
- scarmig 11y agoMusing: Hmm, so let's play with Diffie-Hellplant. So you have two inbred genomes as two secrets, persisted as individual organisms. Alice and Bob negotiate on a public inbred genome that they pull from some kind of seed store (being careful to never re-use one they've used before!). Alice and Bob both create their own crossbreeds deterministically, from the secret organism and the public one. It's hard to get the private genomes from the two crosses, so they can send the seeds in the mail to each other. After that, I'm not sure you can get two shared secret clones from the crossbreeds and the opposite private inbreeds. (ETA: Pretty positive you can't, though if anyone has any ideas along these lines, I'm eager to hear!) Sounds like the start of some cypher-biopunk novel, though.
- gknoy 11y agoUntil this moment, I had not realized I would find such a book interesting.
- scarmig 11y agoIf you're interested in sci-fi where biotech trumps cybertech, The Windup Girl is a great read. Relevant to the article, too. It's set in a post-carbon dystopian Bangkok, where giant agribusiness monopolies dominate the world through control of the food supply, including offensive bioengineering to create mutant plagues that destroy native crops and introduce dependency. The main character is an agent of one of these agricorps, whose mission is espionage against Thailand's central seedbank.
- DanBC 11y agoAlso "Calorie Man". Seemingly available here: http://www.nightshadebooks.com/Downloads/WindupStories.pdf http://www.nightshadebooks.com/Downloads/WindupStories.pdf
- ethbro 11y ago"Calorie Man" reminded me a lot of "New Rose Hotel" by Gibson. Funny how the same story filters through different lenses as the years tick past.
- thaumasiotes 11y agoBut in this case, deducing the exact secret is trivially easy; everyone knows how to do it.
- stephengillie 11y agoYes, which is why we're discussing Chinese people digging corn seeds out of American farms.