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> There was a scene in one of Alastair Reynold's books where a character basically was a computational archaeologist. Not sure about Alastair Reynold but there
by irdc 3y ago
> There was a scene in one of Alastair Reynold's books where a character basically was a computational archaeologist.
Not sure about Alastair Reynold but there’s Pham Nuwen in Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky who is indeed that: a programmer archaeologist (and programmer-at-arms to exploit the weaknesses in the other party’s software midden).
- geuis 3y agoAh actually I think that's right. Thanks!
- db48x 3y agoI love that book. I liked that Pham founds the Qeng Ho specifically so that he could be the one commissioning new software for the ships. He wanted to be the one putting hidden backdoors, secret passwords, and booby–traps into it. Of course it’s built on Unix, but if you’re paying attention you’ll notice that when someone enters a command they type “a column of text”. He also built interstellar communication networks specifically so that civilizations that fell could rebuild more quickly (at least once they reinvented radio) and could learn the Qeng Ho language and systems in the process. But he also put in encrypted channels so that Qeng Ho traders would have inside information and therefore an edge against outside traders. And then Nau gets his hands on it all, with his crew of Focused to examine every line of source code…
- bumbledraven 3y agoToday, Vinge could have written: "with his LLMs to examine every line of source code ..."
- db48x 3y agoIn fairness to Vinge, that wasn’t a direct quote :)
- DylanSp 3y agoAnd even with Nau's Focused working for years, they don't uncover the backdoors in the localizers, between the sheer amount of code and whatever obfuscation Pham added.
- db48x 3y agoSpoilers! Also, they had very complex “ensemble behavior” that resisted analysis. I once wrote some code that I was almost not clever enough to debug, so I can believe it.