Marcus G. Daniels wrote at 09/12/2013 09:24 PM:
One way to avoid going down and down is to build a paranoid compiler. Imagine using a loop of adds to do a multiply (or for base 2, left shifts), and in another case just using a multiply instruction.
It all boils back down to state-less computing ... we need a new motto: "security through anarchy" ... doesn't rhyme as well as security through obscurity, though.
Doing this at a higher level is possible, but the more complex the instructions are, the harder it may be to formulate isomorphic cases. How do you convert a "Drive to work" operation into to "Fly to New York City" operation? [...] One person is unlikely to have the breadth to understand the preferred form (source) of all of these, but diverse overlapping communities working in public could secure them, and no reverse engineering would be needed.
If we know this is/will-be the case, then why press for absolute transparency at all? Why not be anarcho-capitalist and allow for the opacity of some, strategically allowed, opacity? Regardless, the genetic construction of "Drive to work" vs. "Fly to NYC" need not be that different, though they probably _will_ be very different in any particular case. It reminds me of a conversation I just had with a bunch of automatic programming skeptics. My role in the argument was to assert the typical ALife case that it is difficult to _abduce_ from the one example of life that we have to a general understanding of life. (I learned a new word at the same conference - though not in this particular argument - "gnotobiotic" http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gnotobiotic.) And a noble objective would be to try to regenerate life forms based on new genetic structures, ideally computational structures. They didn't give me a chance to allow for synthetic biology because their reactions were so .... vehement. One guy said it's flat out impossible. Another guy expressed that it was a complete waste of time. The only female in the discussion kept asking loaded questions i mplying that I was either feeble-minded or insane. 8^) The conversation devolved into objective functions and I found myself torn between adopting my "wacko/moron" role vs. lecturing them on implicit objective functions and co-evolution. Guess which one I chose. ;-) Anyway, my point here is that working at the interface level carries more benefit than cost for the same reasons that test-driven development has taken over (at least in hype) the s/w development world. I tend to view it as a "constraint based approach" to the world. Forcing absolute transparency (even if only in the ideal) seems like a low RoI commitment. Lastly, it's also important to realize that your egalitarian concept of of the diverse overlapping communities _might_ turn out to be naive or overly simple. If we think in terms of gaming, there should arise some seriously competent gamers who pool resources into a very small (and controllable) cabal that has a better understanding of the entire stack than anyone else. And, not only will the transparency _not_ assist the rest of us schlubs in keeping that cabal honest, it will _prevent_ that because the cabal can hide behind the illusion of transparency. They can always say things like "It's all on the up and up! The source code's out there. Check it yourself." ... all the while _knowing_ that without their billions of dollars in assets we normal people cannot "check it ourselves". Hence, perhaps similar to "green washing", the good gamers will use our own ideology against us. -- ⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella And even though I'm sitting waiting for Mars; I don't believe there's any future in cause
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