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Re: Vinge on PKE ?
> LP+Apologies if I repeat a question which has already been answered.
> +My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive, and I miss many
> +important postings. Some time ago it was asked why Vernor Vinge
> +made passing reference to humans' naivete in trusting public key
> +encryption, and some posters were seeking to contact professor
> +Vinge for clarification. Has any further explanation been
> +discovered for his distrust of PKE?
>
> I once had a girlfriend who factored five digit numbers just by
> looking at them. "29367? No, that's not prime. It's 117 times
> 251..." Good ol' Elizabeth. That's what you get for an "IQ" of
> around 175. Surely there might be higher "IQ's" someplace else in
> Universe?
>
> Albert Szent-Georgi once told me his thought that an IQ difference of
> thirty points meant that one person solves by inspetion problems which
> no amount of explanation can make clear to the other. He added that
> in a normal day we run into people spanning three such gulfs.
>
> If an IQ of 100 routinely factors two digit decimal numbers, and you
> get another digit for every twenty or thirty points, then you're
> looking for beings with IQ's in the 1,000 range to factor 100 digits
> binary...
There is a class of people called "idiot savants" who contain people who can also solve such
problems by inspection - their IQs are often much lower than 100, so that
blows Albert's theory. These so-called "idiot savants" can easily factor
100 digit numbers. The ability to solve such problems is not tied to IQ,
as there are many such people with IQs of 150+ who cannot solve them.
--
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