Hi, a timeline question, and some math about encryption

[Drashner1]

On the quantum infotec stuff, I've been writing up a first draft of an interlinkled set of articles -- it's given me an excuse to do some more reading on quantum computing and quantum algorithms, and clarify some of the stuff I half-knew, which has been fun. (Trying to explain quantum mechanics to non-physicists -- and occasionally to graduate physics students -- is hobby of mine :-) ) Once I have them in draft form, I'll start another thread for them in the appropriate section. They have a few minor retcons for various other articles, but they're generally of the form "the silk god/the great whale/lum/vecs/muuh archives/whatever is cooler than you previously thought because (nifty quantum infotech)". Similarly for the article on computational complexity and encryption (which will be heavy on dubifiers and "high level transapiences assure us that it's safe to...") -- it actually makes sense to do that second, since it refers pretty heavily to the first, or maybe I'll bundle them.

Sounds good. As an aside, this sounds like it might impact the Polarizers article as well.

On technotelepathy vs deductive telepathy -- you're right, I had the terminology mixed up. Technotelepathy on quantum sophonts is a whole different question (basically, if you try it while they're being fully-quantum (which requires quantum infotech), they pass out, or at last go mentally blank, due to the No Cloning Theorum for quantum information -- taking piece of quantum information from their head literally removes it, they no longer have it; or if you use classical infotech you're basically a noise source, so either you learn nothing or you leran almost nothing and their algorithm breaks spectaculalry. So assuming decent autosentience their brain is as as protected from eavsdropping as a quantum encrypted channel, though there are subtleties around what I'm calling "classical checkpointing" or when quantum computronium is running a classical algorithm or interacting with the classical world -- the short version is, hack their backup system instead, it's far easier -- I'll address both in my draft writeup)

Sounds good. Just so I'm clear on this - technotelepathy (directly reading or making a copy of a mind-state) on a quantum sophont is basically unworkable (with the exception of their backup), but deductive telepathy (essentially psychological profiling cranked to 11) is perfectly doable - correct?

On the future stuff, I thought of a possible loophole assuming we want to keep the main setting in 10,600. Could we have the article be derived from multiple copies of the EG from inside the "Orion's Arms" virch as 'leakage from the distant future' in via some obscure Roman loop phenomenon or whatever (or some similar solution) that seems consistent enough across multiple parallel histories and significant enough in content that the real EG editors figured it was worth publishing it anyway in 10,600 (with a detailed warning paragraph at the top)? So for the article on the Chaos, for example, we'd both keep the current article, and add a "possible future version of questionable provenace" as well? That Orion's Arms virch is presumably a prediction of the future presumably run by some archai, possibly up to an S6 (in which case it's probably Yesod), possibly even derived from one-or-more Tipler oracle runs -- so it's more of "a plausible prediction" than "a guaranteed outcome", and has trustworthiness questions (particulary around S6 -> S7 ascentions, which is a lot of what I want to talk about). And it gives anyone else who feels like writing future material an excuse -- plus they don't even need to be fully mutually consistent with what I wrote (though they should probably have similar overall directions, like "S7 is hard"), because the "Orion's Arms" virch has parallel histories.

Hm. Interesting idea I just read back through the Orion's Arms virch article and what you suggest seems workable on general principles. We might need to tweak the current article a bit here and there, but that seems workable enough. We might also want to do some tweaking to put greater emphasis on the controversial nature of the virch as a possible bottleworld (we've cranked up the negative view of these a bit since this article was first created) and possibly either power up Query or eir mysterious master to support the kind of computronium it would take to the level of simulations described and then the kind of stuff it would take to simulate an S7 even remotely. Not uber detailed stuff really, we can crank up the mystery and conspiracy theory element a good bit on this one, but enough to make it plausible that such high level toposophic events could be happening.

On a related note - would you like to present this as something that is has been an ongoing thing (just part of the Orion's Arm virtuality since it started doing its thing? Something that has a definite starting point, but that point is in the past? Or something that has just started to happen/be reported in the 'now' of 10,600AT (so it's making the equivalent of the nightly news)?

Todd