Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

gwern.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 145 posts

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#91

Post by lonelappde »

alasano wrote: post #51
c22 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you possessed such a device then errors in your "predictions" would be indicative of another party using a similar device. As such, I assume multiple parties would soon discover each other, engage in an incomprehensibly complex time-battle, and there would suddenly ( instantaneously in all patched timelines) be only one such party. Furthermore, I imagine it would be very easy for such a party to accidently blunder…

As a fan of time travel movies, I'd watch this.

It's approximately the plot of Primer

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#92

Post by lonelappde »

dmurray wrote: post #71
Malic wrote: post #23

This is somewhat related to a thought experiment of mine. Suppose you had a means of transmitting information back in time - a one-node network that effectively could email to itself with a timestamp (in the past) being the message's "recipient." Suppose such a thing existed in the world today. Assume the individuals in possession of such a thing were very intelligent, very careful and very guarded about its use. Cou…

There's an Asimov short story called The Red Queen's Race which deals with this question: what if the ancient Greeks had received a few hints about modern chemistry? I won't spoil how it relates more directly to your question.

Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#93

Post by magpi3 »

rolltiide wrote: post #77
arugulum wrote: post #39

I would frame things a little differently. Light makes a lot of mistakes because the Death note is incredibly powerful and there would be almost no reasonable way for L to catch Light without Light making obvious mistakes (and would also make for a boring story). Undoubtedly, the biggest mistake Light makes is revealing the existence of the Death Note, and all the rules therein, which not only gives L (almost) all th…

Death Note ended when L died.

This is a significant spoiler for those who haven't seen the show. Please delete it.

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#94

Post by lonelappde »

the8472 wrote: post #33
Malic wrote: post #23

This is somewhat related to a thought experiment of mine. Suppose you had a means of transmitting information back in time - a one-node network that effectively could email to itself with a timestamp (in the past) being the message's "recipient." Suppose such a thing existed in the world today. Assume the individuals in possession of such a thing were very intelligent, very careful and very guarded about its use. Cou…

Time machines can be used as computers to reduce PSPACE (which includes NP) problems to constant time.

Is polynomial space something to assume every time traveler has?

Even ones without a TARDIS?

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#95

Post by squirrelicus »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #63
squirrelicus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember, the goal is fear, not specificity. I think that's where your proposal breaks down. Light is powerhungry and arrogant, but he's also very moralistic. A character that proritizes fear over accuracy would be a different character than Light. He wants to build a better, even perfect, world. And for that, he must have accuracy. Otherwise he's a mere tyrant, something he believes he is not. Of course, it's wort…

Is that really meant as the tragedy? I'm not sure to what extent it's really intended that way. Light's attitude to criminal justice is a distressingly realistic one in a country where 99% of arrests lead to confessions . Just a little light reading that's close at hand from a few years back: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2015/12/05/forced-to-confe... https://www.economist.com/asia/2015/12/03/silent-screams See a…

I can't speak to the intent. Upton Sinclair's Jungle was a socialist manifesto that accidentally missed America's heart and hit her gut instead.

What I can say is approximately 100% of material that gets popular is simply the retelling of something like 7 archetypal stories that our human minds resonate with. Watch Moana and Wreck it Ralph, they're the same story: the Resurrection of the Spirit of the Father. Watch Harry Potter and LOTR and the 5th Element, they're the same story as David and Goliath: the Overcoming the Impossible. Death Note and Faust are the same story: the Pact with the Devil.

I could go on.

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#96

Post by the8472 »

lonelappde wrote: post #94
the8472 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time machines can be used as computers to reduce PSPACE (which includes NP) problems to constant time.

Is polynomial space something to assume every time traveler has? Even ones without a TARDIS?

PSPACE[0] is a computational complexity class, not about topology ("larger on the inside").

Any timemachine that produces self-consistent timelines (arrives at a fixed point after a finite amount of iterations) can be used to solve problems in PSPACE.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSPACE [1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/ctc.pdf

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#97

Post by danShumway »

arugulum wrote: post #88
danShumway wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that the Death Note would only manipulate luck to a certain degree -- ie, if the odds of even occurring are greater than 1/x, just make it happen. That would allow you to get hit by a truck crossing the street, but not allow you to win a coin flip 100 times (7.8886091e-31 odds). You'd probably have to experiment to figure out what the threshold was. That being said... let's assume you're right. If th…

>If the death note can manipulate odds to an arbitrary degree, you're thinking way too small right now. Right, what I feel might be the case is that the targeted output needs to at least be verifiable (hence see my second proposal). An argument could be made that unless the person has a way of verifying their action, there is no way to ensure that the desired outcome is achieved, so the instruction is invalid. (Separ…

> it is possible for the person to be mistaken about the validity of their method

That's a good point.

> are 23-day machine-verifiable

Here's a followup question. Can a person be part of the machine?

For example, I might rephrase my earlier entry to be:

"X closes their eyes and types random keys, such that they form an algorithm for quickly factoring large primes. They email that algorithm to light.iskira@gmail.com and receive a confirmation that their algorithm is sound. At which point, they become so excited that they run into the street and are hit by a bus and killed."

My worry with that is that if there is some kind of force behind the death note, it might decide to just manipulate me instead of the person writing the algorithm. I don't want an evil genie scenario where I just accidentally write "yes, it works", instead of "no, it doesn't."

By extension, if we have a 23-day machine-verifiable problem, am I allowed to specify that the machine is not glitching or producing errors? In some cases, that might be more likely than finding the correct answer. Shinagami picking the most likely scenario that technically fits the criteria might be an effective way for them to reduce some abuse of the system.

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#98

Post by flocial »

magpi3 wrote: post #93
rolltiide wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death Note ended when L died.

This is a significant spoiler for those who haven't seen the show. Please delete it.

I agree, it's not only a spoiler but adds nothing to the main subject under discussion.

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#99

Post by Terr_ »

c22 wrote: post #49
Malic wrote: post #23

This is somewhat related to a thought experiment of mine. Suppose you had a means of transmitting information back in time - a one-node network that effectively could email to itself with a timestamp (in the past) being the message's "recipient." Suppose such a thing existed in the world today. Assume the individuals in possession of such a thing were very intelligent, very careful and very guarded about its use. Cou…

If you possessed such a device then errors in your "predictions" would be indicative of another party using a similar device. As such, I assume multiple parties would soon discover each other, engage in an incomprehensibly complex time-battle, and there would suddenly ( instantaneously in all patched timelines) be only one such party. Furthermore, I imagine it would be very easy for such a party to accidently blunder…

In the book Singularity Sky [0], mankind invented the first time-looped computer, and it cycled up to a godlike overlord. After making a lot of very disruptive changes (which of course seem to be immediate to everyone else) it seems to have become surprisingly disinterested or uninvolved.

Anyway, it has only one hard "commandment": Nobody can violate causality anywhere inside its own historic light-cone, since doing so could be a potential attack (or competition) to its own existence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky

Re: Death Note: L, Anonymity and Eluding Entropy (2017)

#100

Post by zawerf »

wyxuan wrote: post #37
s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He/they may be known to some. https://medium.com/cryptomuse/how-the-nsa-caught-satoshi-nak...

Stylometry only works too an extent with helping to identify what's what. I could just stylometry to show that this document was written by a professional screenwriter, but it writing style isn't unique enough to identify one person out of billions. Gwern has an excellent post about this.

I remember a really impressive demo where someone found all the alt accounts of a HN user using stylometry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17944484 The account didn't have that many comments on it (maybe ~1000 karma)

He also claims to have used the same algorithm for identifying company insiders for trades (see parent comment in that thread for context).

I don't think he was bullshitting even though his tool isn't public because he has a different NLP project that works reasonably well (https://hnprofile.com/ which can find users based on their interests).

Post reply on HN