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I agree, I really don’t like this one either. There are many things in math that are counterintuitive, but the idea of a homomorphism is not one of them in my o
by dfdz 5y ago
I agree, I really don’t like this one either. There are many things in math that are counterintuitive, but the idea of a homomorphism is not one of them in my opinion.
Once someone explains the idea, and provides a few examples it is very natural.
I also don’t like the text explaining zero knowledge proof. It needs the phrase “practically speaking” somewhere or “for practical purposes” since it’s not true in a strict sense
But overall there were some fun ideas on the list!
- Ar-Curunir 5y agoWhat do you mean by the line about zkps? We have perfectly-hiding proofs that reveal no information about the secret information, no matter how powerful the adversary is.
- chriswarbo 5y agoYes, but they're not proofs in the mathematical sense, since there's always an (exponentially-shrinking) chance that the answers were only correct due to coincidence.
- dfdz 5y agoExactly, practically it makes no different that the method could be fooled with a very tiny probability, but when making these counterintuitive statements I think it is important to be precise. Ideally the reader should fully understand the statement and still feel amazed, rather than doubting the statement for a valid reason: perfect zero knowledge proof systems (which do not fail sometimes) are impossible and a reader would be right to think so