paulfchristiano comments on Cryptographic Boxes for Unfriendly AI - Less Wrong

24 Post author: paulfchristiano 18 December 2010 08:28AM

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Comment author: gwern 24 December 2010 03:15:46AM 0 points [-]

No no, Haskell probably does. Look at the ST monad - you go 'into' it and then you can perform all sorts of destructive updates but purity is preserved by having to 'escape' it before its results are available anywhere else.

Comment author: paulfchristiano 24 December 2010 04:00:33AM 0 points [-]

The problem is that the only thing Haskell can do with functions is use them as black boxes, to the best of my knowledge. To apply a function to homomorphically encrypted data, you can't use it as a black box---you need to use an explicit description of the function.

Comment author: gwern 24 December 2010 04:30:27AM *  0 points [-]

Well, my point was that you can do something akin to Perl's taint - force operations to be done only within a particular type context.

So you could do something similar to the ST monad but instead of accepting functions which generate any type output, it operates on, say, a parse tree/ADT representing a Lisp function which is evaluated with the rest of the homomorphic data.

But it's not really important; any such strategy would probably be done in a new language (for efficiency, if nothing else) and the into/escape invariant enforced by manual code inspection or something.