Re: Let's form an RC5 cracking team

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Wed, 17 Sep 1997 15:06:35 -0500

There are alternatives to Bovine. One of them, Infinite Monkeys, is offering
$8K of the $10K instead of a mere $1K. I don't know how much of the keyspace
they've explored, relatively speaking, but I get the impression they're
exploring different spaces due to the different algorithms used.

I'm more impressed by Bovine getting 38% of a 2^56 space. That's enough to
do, what, almost a quarter of a second of human thought? And all this by
offering $1K? In a few years, anybody with a Power-program to debug will be
able to get human-level processing power, albeit slowed down by a couple of
thousand to one, by offering a mere $10K.

In fact, how do we *know* these are key-testers we're running and not a
distributed, sentient mathematician?

-- 
         sentience@pobox.com      Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
          http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
           http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer:  Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.