Sorry, for this rather late reply to an old thread, but Im not
reading all the extropy list postings every day anymore...
(too little time, too much to do... :-< )
In a posting from March 10th, Zero Powers wrote:
> When talking nano, the best defense is an infallible, impenetrable and
> non-hackable offense. For your plan to work, your offense would have
> to be practically perfect and everyone else's offense would have to be
> imperfect.
No, you DONT need a *PERFECT* defense.
Lets assume an active shield defense made out of a large amount of
separate bots. Then what you need, to overcome any enemy attack, is :
More resources at standby than the attacker, and a way to detect if
your own defense bots are not secretly modified by the attacker.
Your defense bots may be less efficient in destroying and detecting
enemy bots, as long is this is compensated by a larger amount of
defense/attack resources.
For example if you have a hundred times as many defensebots (and the
bots are of the same order of size as the attacker) then all your
defense bots need to do is seek out and destroy the enemy bots.
Because you have a hundred times the amount of bots, you dont need a
perfect way to destroy the enemy bots. Your defense bots only have to
be more than 1% effective in destroying the enemy bots than vice versa!
I think its quite unlikely that (assuming you try staying informed
about the latest technology) your enemy can get ahead in technology
by such a large amount that its bots are a hundred times more
effective at attacking. (It could even be fundamentally impossible
to make a hundred times more effective attacking bots.)
Of course, you will have to keep an eye on your potential enemies,
to check if they are not trying to create more resources than you
can overcome with your own defense resources available.
The most difficult detail could be in the mechanisms used for
detection of modification to your own defense bots. Maybe some
kind of public key certificate system could be used, where the
secret key is destroyed by the bot when its integrity is expected
to be violated. (When all public key systems are rendered useless,
because of for example quantum computers, a secret key system
with some heavily guarded central lookup systems could be used
in stead. However this last option is more vulnerable and less
efficient.) These will be used together with external
recognition mechanisms.
However all these detection mechanisms dont need to have
perfect 100% efficiency. In case of a 100 times more resources
it would already be sufficient to have more than 1% efficiency!
(When assuming the same destruction efficiency as the enemy.)
Im fairly confident that detection mechanisms with a certain
limited efficiency are possible.
So ultimately it all comes down to who has the most resources
(e.g. the most defense/attack bots at hand). And the one who
starts first creating these resources will thus have the edge.
(However this is assuming that no fundamentally new physics
will be discovered by your enemy that you are not aware of.)
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