faul_sname comments on Open Thread, November 16–30, 2012 - Less Wrong
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I think something is very, very wrong with me. Instead of feeling Lovecraftian horror upon reading that, I immediately began trying to think of ways to use Predictors to hack the universe. Here's what I came up with (you may want to try for yourself before reading further):
That's just what I thought of in the first 5 minutes. I think the Predictors would be insanely dangerous, but primarily for reasons other than driving humans insane.
Hi, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres... Is that you?
It wouldn't really break RSA or other algorithms, it would just push the security parameters on everything way up until you can't verify the solutions in <1 second. In particular, encoding a single code word would always require at least 1 second of time, so cryptographic algorithms would become slow.
If I were a jerk, I could publish a prime number as my RSA public key. Then anyone who tries to use stable time loops to find my private key would find themselves or their computers disrupted by bizarre coincidences (and as you've mentioned, those coincidences probably aren't a good thing for the most part).
Ooh, that's evil. I like that.
Well, this particular method can be defeated by running a primality tester first. Still, it's important that the problem you're solving in this method has a solution (or a short proof of lack of a solution) which I think restricts us to problems in the intersection of NP and co-NP.
Footnote: "One curious property of predictors is that whenever anyone tries to do something clever with them they convert into antimatter annihilating the experimenter and surrounding area"
I like the idea of allowing a sufficiently clever person with a webcam turn a predictor into a potent weapon.