sixes_and_sevens comments on Open Thread, September 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong
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I'm thinking about a fantasy setting that I expect to set stories in in the future, and I have a cryptography problem.
Specifically, there are no computers in this setting (ruling out things like supercomplicated RSA). And all the adults share bodies (generally, one body has two people in it). One's asleep (insensate, not forming memories about what's going on, and not in any sort of control over the body) and one's awake (in control, forming memories, experiencing what's going on) at any given time. There is not necessarily any visible sign when one party falls asleep and the other wakes, although there are fakeable correlates (basically, acting like you just appeared wherever you are). It does not follow a rigid schedule, although there is an approximate maximum period of time someone can stay awake for, and there are (also fakeable) symptoms of tiredness. Persons who share bodies still have distinct legal and social existences, so if one commits a crime, the other is entitled to walk free while awake as long as they come back before sleeping - but how do they prove it?
There are likely to be three levels of security, with one being "asking", the second being a sort of "oh yeah? prove it" ("tell me something only my wife would know / exhibit a skill your cohabitor hasn't mastered / etc."), and the third being... something. Because you don't want to turn loose someone who could be a dangerous criminal just because they were collaborating with a third party to learn information, or broke into the National Database of Secret Person-Distinguishing Passphrases, or didn't disclose all their skills to some central skill registry - but you don't want to lock up innocent people who made bad choices about who to move in with when they were eight, either.
Is there something that doesn't require computers, or human-atypical levels of memorization/computation, or rely critically on a potentially-break-into-able National Database of Secret Person-Distinguishing Passphrases, which will let someone have a permanently private bit of information they can use to verify to arbitrary others who they are? (There is magic, but it is not math-doing magic.)
All personalities are given a pair of esoteric stimuli. Through reinforcement/punishment, one personality is conditioned to have a positive physiological reaction to Stimulus A and a negative physiological reaction stimulus B. The other personality is given the converse.
The stimuli are all drawn from a common pool of images like "bear", "hat" or "bicycle", so one half of a stimuli pair may be "a bear in a hat on a bicycle". There's a canonical set of stimuli, like a huge deck of cards, with all possible combinations, all of which are numbered. The numbers for my stimuli pair are tattoed on my body in some obscure location, like the sole of my foot.
If I need to prove my identity, I show my tattoo to the authority figure. It will read something like "1184/0346". They pick out either image 1184 (bear in a hat on a bicycle) or image 0346 (a sword in a hill being struck by lightning), and show it to me. My immediate response will be either arousal or disgust, and they will know which personality I am.