5 ms·

If P=NP then we already have the hardware to crack RSA encryption. The above sentence is true, but it has no bearing on anything.

by xamuel 10y ago

logicallee 10y ago
don't you think it would have a lot more bearing if you had 7 billion devices nonchallantly walking around cracking RSA every day using the same or less hardware? (but we couldn't reverse-engineer them, because they were obfuscated in biology)? The fact that they weren't reverse-engineered (yet) would still have huge bearing on everything. By 7 billion samples I mean the humans walking around. Your analogy with an RSA crack is fundamentally different beccause biology doesn't do it in 3 pounds of grey goo in seven billion different bodies already. so you would have to come up with an analogy that uses something we cant use, to say, okay fine it exists and fine, we have the hardware to also do it, but the former doesn't have any bearing on us doing the latter.
- xamuel 10y ago
  Interesting observation. If brains routinely cracked RSA, that could be evidence that P=NP. Still it wouldn't help us find the P-time algorithm in question. We could say "it seems to exist", but that would not imply "we'll discover it any day now".
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    > If brains routinely cracked RSA For brains numbers have a completely different meaning and internal representation than for computers. Brains don't "think in numbers". Doing the kind of math we invented is a major effort for the brain, it's not what it developed for, and it is very poorly equipped to do explicit numerical calculations (emphasis on "explicit"). So looking at brains to "crack RSA" seems like waiting for a hammer to be useful in driving screws.
- inimino 10y ago
  How much computing hardware does it take to beat a human at chess or at go? (Less than you think, Deep Blue was hopelessly inefficient.) And how long did it take for those much simpler things to happen?

If P=NP then we already have the hardware to crack RSA encryption. The above sentence is true, but it has no bearing on anything.

by xamuel 10y ago

If P=NP then we already have the hardware to crack RSA encryption. The above sentence is true, but it has no bearing on anything.

logicallee 10y ago

don't you think it would have a lot more bearing if you had 7 billion devices nonchallantly walking around cracking RSA every day using the same or less hardware? (but we couldn't reverse-engineer them, because they were obfuscated in biology)? The fact that they weren't reverse-engineered (yet) would still have huge bearing on everything. By 7 billion samples I mean the humans walking around. Your analogy with an RSA crack is fundamentally different beccause biology doesn't do it in 3 pounds of grey goo in seven billion different bodies already. so you would have to come up with an analogy that uses something we cant use, to say, okay fine it exists and fine, we have the hardware to also do it, but the former doesn't have any bearing on us doing the latter.

xamuel 10y ago
Interesting observation. If brains routinely cracked RSA, that could be evidence that P=NP. Still it wouldn't help us find the P-time algorithm in question. We could say "it seems to exist", but that would not imply "we'll discover it any day now".
- Noseshine 10y ago
  > If brains routinely cracked RSA For brains numbers have a completely different meaning and internal representation than for computers. Brains don't "think in numbers". Doing the kind of math we invented is a major effort for the brain, it's not what it developed for, and it is very poorly equipped to do explicit numerical calculations (emphasis on "explicit"). So looking at brains to "crack RSA" seems like waiting for a hammer to be useful in driving screws.
inimino 10y ago
How much computing hardware does it take to beat a human at chess or at go? (Less than you think, Deep Blue was hopelessly inefficient.) And how long did it take for those much simpler things to happen?