<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/12/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Jared</b> <<a href="mailto:jared@hatwhite.com">jared@hatwhite.com</a>> wrote:</span><div><br> </div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
"industry." So, yes, there is an industry, and one of its<br>internal debates is whether to use the word "trinary" or "ternary,"<br>with the latter being more technically accurate, but the former
<br>being more popular.</blockquote><div><br>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.
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>True. You do have a point here. Let me more precise then, what we're<br>discussing is the case where data is available, but in encrypted form
<br>without a key. In such cases, a key will soon be unnecessary....</blockquote><div><br>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.
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> The only way to prevent such pattern-based analysis from cracking<br>
> open any binarily-encrypted clump of data, or even a packet stream,<br>> is to generate TRULY RANDOM keys, which can only be created ... you<br>> guessed it ... within a ternary pattern-based algorithm. You already
</blockquote><div><br>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.
<br> </div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Use polyvalent logic, the third option, that a statement is<br>"true under certain conditions" and "false under other conditions,"
<br>and therefore its truth value is UNKNOWN, YET KNOWABLE. Now _this_<br>is the way to look at what is before you. If you continue to look<br>at it with binary eyes, you will continue to see a pile of BS.<br>I'm okay with that.
</blockquote><div><br>Why not use a quaternary system of False/True/Unknown Yet Knowable/UnKnowable?<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Instead of leaping from one extreme to the other, it opens up smoothly<br>into an infinite recursion, like fractals do. For example, something<br>which is VIRTUALLY TRUE, being very close to completely true, is in<br>this middle area. Likewise so is something VIRTUALLY FALSE, and so
<br>is the WHOLE RANGE BETWEEN. To binary eyes, it looks like a single</blockquote><div><br>Ah. We need to sex it up then, and have False/Virtually False/Virtually True/True/UYK/UK.<br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
empty area, neither true nor false and therefore useless. In truth<br>it is actually a spectrum: a window into infinity which has much<br>more smooth transitions than binary.</blockquote><div><br>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.
<br> </div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">It is _this_ incremental ability that makes ternary logic much closer<br>to analog -- and strangely, quaternary logic is worse, not better.
</blockquote><div><br>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.
<br><br>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.
<br><br>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.
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>Yes, these examples are good. Note, however, all of these are<br>reliant upon an interface with the analog, or "real" world. What
<br>I am talking about is generating such randomness entirely<br>within the digital world, or at least so elegantly that there<br>is no need for a geiger counter, keyboard, or mouse movements.</blockquote><div><br>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.
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