On 8/12/07, Jared [email protected] wrote:
"industry." So, yes, there is an industry, and one of its
internal debates is whether to use the word "trinary" or "ternary," with the latter being more technically accurate, but the former being more popular.
I think 'trinary' works well to stress that it's an alternative to binary. But if you use ternary, you won't have trits, you'll have teits, or terits, or terts, or something.
True. You do have a point here. Let me more precise then, what we're discussing is the case where data is available, but in encrypted form without a key. In such cases, a key will soon be unnecessary....
I don't think so. There are keys that are sufficiently long that no brute-force attack is practical, because the size of the keyspace is on the order of the number of atoms in the planet.
The only way to prevent such pattern-based analysis from crackingopen any binarily-encrypted clump of data, or even a packet stream, is to generate TRULY RANDOM keys, which can only be created ... you guessed it ... within a ternary pattern-based algorithm. You already
Bullshit. There's nothing about a ternary algorithm that enhances generation of randomness. An algorithm either has random INPUTS or it doesn't. Given the same inputs, any algorithm always produces the same answer. If it doesn't, it's no good as an algorithm.
Use polyvalent logic, the third option, that a statement is
"true under certain conditions" and "false under other conditions," and therefore its truth value is UNKNOWN, YET KNOWABLE. Now _this_ is the way to look at what is before you. If you continue to look at it with binary eyes, you will continue to see a pile of BS. I'm okay with that.
Why not use a quaternary system of False/True/Unknown Yet Knowable/UnKnowable?
Instead of leaping from one extreme to the other, it opens up smoothly
into an infinite recursion, like fractals do. For example, something which is VIRTUALLY TRUE, being very close to completely true, is in this middle area. Likewise so is something VIRTUALLY FALSE, and so is the WHOLE RANGE BETWEEN. To binary eyes, it looks like a single
Ah. We need to sex it up then, and have False/Virtually False/Virtually True/True/UYK/UK.
empty area, neither true nor false and therefore useless. In truth
it is actually a spectrum: a window into infinity which has much more smooth transitions than binary.
Six not enough? How about a tuple: The first value range from 0 meaning known false to 100 for known true, and the second (again ranging from 0 to 100 describes the level of confidence, where 0 means totally unknown, and 100 is absolutely certain)? When the second value hits 100, only 0 and 100 would be normal valid values for the first. The special value (50,100) might mean 'Unknowable', because the 100 says that you know (as much as you can know). Other (x,100) values would be available for things I haven't thought of yet. There's nothing magic about 100 though. It could be 0..15 for each value, neatly fitting the tuple into a byte. Nor do the two values have to use the same range of values.
It is _this_ incremental ability that makes ternary logic much closer
to analog -- and strangely, quaternary logic is worse, not better.
Bullshit. 3 is one closer to infinity than 2. It is perfectly suited to the unique case of representing binary values plus an extra value for "I don't know", but imperfectly suited for representing 3 values plus IDK, where quaternary is better.
It doesn't even work all that well for your 'current in a wire' example. A wire can have current flowing in either direction at a certain voltage, no current, or alternating current with a certain frequency and voltage amplitude. The latter can have more complex waveforms suggesting multiple frequencies and amplitudes. And noise.
Hell, that right there would be a great generator for randomness. Subtract your ideal sine wave from the actual waveform of the AC coming into the machine and use the least-significant bits/trits/quits of it. I wonder what it takes to build a chip for that and tie it to the inside of the power supply where it's not easily tampered with. I'd need something else for this laptop though. A USB cable that runs over to the AC side of the brick, where the waveform monitoring chip would do its work, and a daemon to take the randomness produced by that chip and accumulate it in a file for later use when I'm on battery power.
Yes, these examples are good. Note, however, all of these are reliant upon an interface with the analog, or "real" world. What I am talking about is generating such randomness entirely within the digital world, or at least so elegantly that there is no need for a geiger counter, keyboard, or mouse movements.
The computer exists in reality. The way to get randomness out of electronics is to specifically design them to NOT do error correction and detection. There's no reason why a chip can't be made to accumulate randomness and dispense N bits of it at a time when requested. It's just a matter of whether there's enough demand for it. Not a damn thing to do with the base you count in.