Pavitra comments on Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) discussion thread - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (435)
It would take almost as long to check things like this with Alice as it would to manually check things alone. You'd have to make up your mind to check each possible answer individually, and then Alice could see what would happen if you went on to actually check it. It might save a little time relative to actually going through elaborate checking rigmarole, although adding a second person to the task would make it more person-hours on net.
But you can't just make up your mind to check every possible answer, without picking out a specific one and going, "I'm planning to check this one and then stop". That isn't a plausible thing for you to decide to do if you actually know how hard it's supposed to be, because there's no way you'll actually do it. So Alice can't see you finding the answer.
So it's mostly useful for problems of moderate solvability, that you could solve without the power, given a considerable effort (but not more effort than you would be willing to actually put forth).
For example, you could set Hashcash to mint some expensive stamp, and firmly decide to check its output in three days.
(For those who don't want to take the time to read the link, Hashcash is a proof-of-work system based on brute-force partial preimage attacks against hash (one-way) algorithms.)