Machine and Man in Cyberpunk

[Pulsewidth]

Chemical computing is a dangerous road to go down for your setting. It's completely inadequate for breaking encryption, and always will be (10^9/2^256 = 0 for any level of precision that matters in practice), but part of your mysterious action at a distance hacking system involves a chemical computer (the human brain). If you routinely use non-human chemical computers then you're encouraging people to start thinking about why human brains are needed at all, and that doesn't feel like it will stand up to much investigation.

No fictional setting is completely consistent, so we all agree not to look too closely at the details. This works fine in D&D. Nobody lives in the Forgotten Realms or wherever so it's easy to suspend disbelief. And most of your audience will have no problem with chemical computers having "magical" properties (as in causing setting inconsistency that's handwaved away), because hardly anybody has studied them in much detail. Encryption is not like this. A large portion of your audience are computer nerds, and they've already thought about it too much (which doesn't need to be a lot). It's too late for them to agree not to look closely. Do you really want to tempt people into studying chemical computers and risk losing a critical part of your game balance fluff?

[sabs]

Pulsewidth, you're officially bad for Cyberpunk TTRP. Your need to cling to some meaningless crap to satisfy your incredibly narrow sense of disbelief fucking sucks, and all your I'm a mathematician so I rule nuhuh.. is bad, and irritating. It also doesn't ADD anything to Cyberpunk what so ever. 99% of people who are going to play cyberpunk don't give a shit about that much math. Just let it go. You're pissing in the wind, and wondering why your face is wet.

[Ancient History]

A roleplaying game be used to simulate interacting with the future, it can't build the nuts and bolts of it. There is always going to be a level of handwavium in any RPG, and that is okay. What is important is how it affects the game.

In this case, you have two scenarios for a Cyberpunk RPG: hard encryption and soft encryption.

Hard encryption assumes that the available encryption in the game is effectively impossible to break within the timeframe of the game, unless <insert GM plot device here>. In this case, breaking encryption directly doesn't work so characters focus on either getting the plaintext or the right decryption program and the correct key (yes, beating people up for their passwords counts).

Soft encryption assumes that because of computing/mathemagics/&c. advance X, all encryption is crunchable within the timeframe of the game. This doesn't mean you can't still beat people up for their passwords, but it does mean that the hacker character can leave their laptop running for the night to decrypt the stolen harddrive. A lot of science fiction plots and tropes, especially those with a built-in time limit, assume some form of soft encryption.

Real world is balanced a bit more toward hard encryption, but with a soft crypto mindset. Good crypto is available to anyone that can afford it (commercial and non-commercial encryption software), and anyone that really gives a damn about it (cryptopunks); everyone else just doesn't think about it very much, which results in soft encryption. Everyone here may use encryption and decryption when sending their email every day, but very few of us care enough about it to look for it, or play with the options, and I'm willing to be almost no one here regularly tries to decrypt anything.

From a gaming perspective, soft crypto gives you better stories to tell; hard crypto results in a much more difficult game where you have to beat the passwords out of people.

[Pulsewidth]

Mysterious hacking at a distance gives you most of the benefits of soft crypto without requiring 1+1=giant frog.

[DSMatticus]

A roleplaying game be used to simulate interacting with the future

A better way to think of it is: cyberpunk is as much our future as D&D is our past. You can see the threads of inspiration, you can see the mistakes, and you can see that tons of it is just being made up. But you can't actually use arguments about human past to discuss what is and isn't in D&D, and you can't actually use arguments about human future (or present) to discuss what is and isn't in cyberpunk. They aren't in the realm of human experience and they aren't meant to be, so using your experiences to try and make statements about them is fallacious. And it has to be, or else it (and most sci-fi, really) doesn't work.

Mysterious hacking at a distance gives you most of the benefits of soft crypto without requiring 1+1=giant frog.

No, it really doesn't, at least not without equal amounts of handwavium. Mysterious hacking at a distance requires something to hack nearby that has information to give you that isn't encrypted, which means it's actually pretty much useless for anything when your goal is non-combat remote hacking or data decryption.

The only thing mysterious hacking at a distance helps with is to provide a fluff explanation for combat hacking and provide an interesting addition to the concept of physical network security. We should totally have mysterious hacking at a distance, but it's not all we should have.

[Vebyast]

But you can't actually use arguments about human past to discuss what is and isn't in D&D, and you can't actually use arguments about human future (or present) to discuss what is and isn't in cyberpunk.

Except that this very forum has spent small textbooks applying modern economics to D&D.

Mysterious hacking at a distance gives you most of the benefits of soft crypto without requiring 1+1=giant frog.

No, it really doesn't, at least not without equal amounts of handwavium. Mysterious hacking at a distance requires something to hack nearby that has information to give you that isn't encrypted, which means it's actually pretty much useless for anything when your goal is non-combat remote hacking or data decryption.

I actually feel like the step from "mysteriously hack something nearby" to "mysteriously hack the plaintext out of anything in the world" requires significantly less handwavium than going from "math" to "fuck math", mostly because we can reuse some convenient handwavium from other places. FM requires a break from reality all its own; you can't piggyback it on top of any of the existing "mysteriously hack nearby things" or "abstractly fast computers and abstractly large storage" breaks. However, "hack at any distance" and "no plaintext is ever truly deleted" can use exactly the same handwavium you used to get "abstractly fast computers and abstractly large storage", making it no more unbelievable than mysterious hacking at a distance already was. Or at least no more unbelievable from my perspective.

[jadagul]

Of course, we're not talking the real world, and I personally am of the opinion that we just say encryption does not work and when somone at the table extrapolates outwards from that to things that should be in the setting but aren't, the DM says "that doesn't work, it's all explained on page 138, in the chapter on hacking," and page 138 is a full page splash of trollface.jpg. If it were a perfect world and this were dead tree and I had money I wanted to set on fire, page 139 would have a floppy disc (non-standard is tempting, but might be a bit much) in a plastic sleeve. Should any of the players prove to still have a suitable floppy drive it would hold an audio file titled "P and NP - what you need to know to play" that starts with 30 seconds of speech ripped from a random mathematics lecture and then cuts to Never Gonna Give You Up. Maybe throw in a second file, a text file that contains a url for a website in spanish that, when translated, proves to be a set of directions for assembling a particular piece of ikea furniture. What I'm saying is there is no end to the amount of bullshit I would subject this person to. It probably wouldn't hurt to be more mature about this than I would be, but it probably wouldn't be as fun either.

Anyway, you could also get into the "sure, you might be able to do this, but can your character? Roll for it" solution, but the reality is players probably can come up with encryption schemes that are foolproof for certain purposes if they are so much as amateur hobbyists with access to wikipedia, and telling them their characters (who are professionals at it) are less capable than they are would be difficult for them to swallow in a way "it's sci-fi, it isn't following quite the same rules" isn't.

I'm going on the record as advocating we piss all over mathematicians.

I feel like you and I (and Vebyast) are tantalizingly close to basically agreeing. I think we all agree on the following points:
(1) we want a game where encryption isn't really secure--I can never encrypt something well enough to be sure no one can crack it.
(2) We don't want to specify exactly why this is, because otherwise people will be digging through crypto articles on the internet to come up with a system that still works, and that's dumb.

It seems like we basically want to say "yes, you can get the contents of this file with four hits on a hacking test and one hour," rather than talk about all the different ways the file might or might not be encrypted and how these encryption schemes may or may not work. Give rules for hacking files. But don't explain exactly how it works, because that leads to irritating arguments; tables can decide that you're brute-forcing the key, or using an "evolutionary algorithm," or running some mathematical exploit, or using a side channel attack, or hacking they key out of a remote server, or calling up Ares HQ and social-engineering your way in, or whatever, depending on how that table's knowledge and prejudices lie.

If you specify any particular attack method that's represented by the hacking test, somebody with Wikipedia can come up with a method that will "totally block that, honest." Half the time they'll even be right. Otherwise you have to have the cryptopunk conversation about how encryption is perfect, honest. And the one about one-time pads. And the one about things like zeta functions that essentially generate compressible one-time pads--even if P = NP, you can get the compression from having enough of the cipherstream, but if you don't have access to the cypherstream you can't run any non-trivial attacks. And the one about Quantum Cryptography, which is really kind of scary and unless quantum mechanics is radically different from what we expect, pretty much genuinely unbreakable with a good implementation. And probably something else that someone could dig up with like twenty minutes of research that I don't know about.

Or we could just not specify, and say that hacking the data works, for reasons. And if we like, we can refer people to a website that will explain in more detail.

[Vebyast]

I definitely agree on the first point. Just say that it's four hits on a hacking test and one hour, or you have win a contest, or you have to play go fish with the DM, or whatever. However, I do think that we can achieve that goal without without so much as mentioning decryption. If we end up choosing to talk about mathematics, then "because I say so" is probably the right way to handle it, but I think that we can get away without even starting that conversation in the first place.

[Username17]

You and Pulsewidth keep making the same fundamental error, and this is the kind of insane result you keep coming up with:

Based on my experience solving problems of this size and type using far less effective algorithms, specifically probabilistic roadmaps and rapidly-exploring random trees, and using the same reduction in complexity and increase in speed as given for cryptography, I estimate that I could take a problem for which I would normally get a bad solution in several minutes and instead get an optimal or near-optimal solution in about a second, and potentially much faster. A robot with million-dollar hardware is faster and stronger than a human and with modern software would be gimped by its algorithms, but with the system I laid out above would be acting to the full capabilities of its hardware under most conditions. It would beat a human in effectively any athletic competition that did not involve water or a marathon.

The basic idea you have is that solving a problem has to be difficult based on the size of the potential solution set. So if it takes 4 hours to break a problem with a potential solution set of 2^128 possible answers, it must necessarily take 14 seconds to solve a problem with a potential solution set of 2^118. This isn't just false, it's obviously false and totally ridiculous.

Let's start with the very simplest refutation: 1+1. That is an addition problem with integer inputs, meaning that its potential solution set is "integers" and of a modest infinity of size. Working backwards from the literally infinite solution set would never ever end, and yet the problem itself is trivial and solved essentially instantly. Adding 5012937851273895712357803258057 and -23487234875281774934265892347 has an equally large potential solution set, but obviously has a more processor intensive path to its solution (note: it is also not hard for a computer, just uses more logic gates to get to the end).

A 128 bit key has a potential solution set of 2^128, which is catastrophically titanic. But not nearly so large as the potential solution set size of any form of addition. Working forward instead of backward, it's simply 128 True or False questions. If answering those questions in series is something that takes four hours, then answering the simplest possible question (a simple T or F "code", perhaps the challenge "Do you want to continue [Y/N]?") would still take nearly two minutes. Such a technique would be useful for all kinds of things, but would never ever be any good at all for plotting real time motion problems.

The bottom line is that if are actually able to solve problems in a non-exponential amount of time, then that non-exponentiality scales in both directions. A traveling salesman problem with twenty more cities wouldn't take exponentially more time, but a travelling salesman problem with twenty less cities wouldn't take exponentially less time either. There is no reason to believe that your polynomial time function would ever scale down to the sub-second anything. And that's before we get in to hard time minimums enjoyed by things like chemical processors.

I agree that being able to solve a traveling salesman problem in non-exponential time necessarily implies that you can put an unpowered satellite into orbit around Jupiter with a rail gun, but it doesn't say anything at all about what you can do if you have less than fifteen minutes to contemplate a problem. Super accurate robot death machines is certainly a possible future thing, but it is in no way implied by the mere fact of major crypto systems being broken or even an outright proof that P == NP. Any procedure for solving NP problems in polynomial time is actually quite likely to be of no use for any problem simple enough to be brute forced in a short amount of time, meaning that the smallest problem it will save you time on is still probably something that takes a fair amount of time.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

mysteriously hack the plaintext out of anything in the world

You just set the benchmark people have to pass in order to get perfect security; don't put their plaintext on hackable devices (and if the implication is any device is hackable, that means you're putting some pencil and paper in your cryptoscheme). Sufficiently creative players will just do that when they want the information secure. When the thing in someone's hands is just a bunch of 1's and 0's encrypted, the security of that is basically arbitrary, ranging from "the key is written on the front of the disc in sharpie" to "the only copy of the key is on a piece of paper in the CEO of [Megacorp]'s troll bodyguard's anus and the plaintext was a verbal speech encrypted by hand during transcription." Unless mysteriously hacking things at a distance includes asshacking, this is problematic.

Whatever setting caveats you provide, people can probably build perfect security schemes within them, and will probably at least try to if they expect it will give them any advantage. That is a snake that should be beheaded, not corralled, because we want table time to be spent playing and not herding cryptographers. The audacity of "fuck math" is not a bug, it's a feature.

[Grek]

I feel like I shouldn't have to explain how impractical storing your information in a troll's anus is and why people do not do use that precaution for anything at all.

[Username17]

I feel like I shouldn't have to explain how impractical storing your information in a troll's anus is and why people do not do use that precaution for anything at all.

And yet...





-Username17

[DSMatticus]

I feel like I shouldn't have to explain how impractical storing your information in a troll's anus is and why people do not do use that precaution for anything at all.

Hey, storing things in uncomfortable places inside your own body is in fact a tried and true method for hiding things. The only reason people aren't hiding things inside troll butts right now is because
1) there are currently much better options, and
2) they haven't found any trolls.

But putting aside the comedically ridiculous examples to address the actual point: the players do not get into mundane, typical situations in which the downsides of storing information in a troll's anus (where troll's anus is a metaphor for a difficult to access place in general) outweigh the benefits. They get into the incredibly atypical, incredibly important situations such that doing just that might actually be worth it because the costs of failing to hide that information are amazingly, spectacularly expensive.

That said, I'll decapitate my own argument: hiding keys in this way is not significantly different from hiding the actual information itself, and so any argument I have about how the players can't decrypt information because the key is in some amazingly inaccessible place are exactly as valid regardless of the cryptography debate, because you can just skip the part where you encrypt the data then shove the key where the sun don't shine and shove the data where the sun don't sign. If the only safety in your system is through inaccessibility, cryptography really doesn't matter anyway.

[Username17]

If the only safety in your system is through inaccessibility, cryptography really doesn't matter anyway.

This is precisely why OTPs don't severely impact game play.

If you take your OTP away from your hard drive, you could just as easily have taken the hard drive away instead.

-Username17

[Pulsewidth]

If you're abstracting away processing power/storage, the only advantage symmetric ciphers have over OTPs is that it's very easy to memorize 128 bits of entropy (eg. a 10 word Diceware phrase). This is a small advantage, because if you're in a situation where you can steal somebody's OTP, you're very likely also capable of torturing their key out of their head. In Shadowrun it's even easier, because you have magical and hacking methods of mind-reading.

Both symmetric ciphers and OTPs prevent interception of communications where you're not in hacking range of either end. That's a very common situation, eg. the majority of credstick transactions are out of range of any individual hacker. You also have the option of storing the key/OTP on a tiny computer that's entirely wrapped in copper foil with a small indium tin oxide window for an optical transmitter, enabled with a physical button under the copper, which means the key/OTP can't be hacked until you actually use it. If you use the "deletion is impossible" idea then you can get it even after it's been used and put back in its Faraday cage, at the cost of destroying the Credstick system.

[Pulsewidth]

If you're introducing decryption oracles, you need to give exact technical details of what they're capable (opening up possibilities for them to be incapable of decrypting things) or you get situations like this system for infinite range non-magical telepathy requiring no setup communications, using a plaintext-recovery oracle that can't report failures. This is the weakest class of oracle that can achieve Frank's goal. If it can report failures, or you have a key-recovery oracle, this becomes much simpler.

Alice encodes a message by duplicating each bit c times, where c is some logarithmic function (meaning the error rate can be reduced to zero in practice) of the desired reliability that's tricky to calculate because of the later clock recovery phase. Alice generates a series of 2 bit ciphertexts using any arbitrary stream cipher with any arbitrary key (possibly a weak cipher if that makes things easier for Bob's oracle), each encrypting a data bit from the encoded message followed by a clock bit. The clock bit starts at 0 and inverts every c encryptions. She doesn't bother sending any of these ciphertexts to Bob because they're only 2 bits each.

Bob repeatedly runs the plaintext-recovery oracle on all 4 possibilities, specifying that it's the nth ciphertext from Alice each block of 4. Assuming c is sufficiently large, Bob can recover the clock period and message length by comparing the expected distribution of clock bits with the measured distribution. This is the kind of noisy hill climbing search that evolutionary algorithms actually can solve, but there are certainly more efficient methods of solving it. If Alice didn't generate any ciphertexts then Bob's clock recovery will fail.

Bob can then discard all the obviously incorrect decryptions with the wrong clock bit, and recover the data bits by simply averaging the remaining possible data bits over each clock period. If Alice and Bob agreed on a value of c in advance then this system becomes much simpler.

[Ancient History]

OR Alice uses Encrypt 3 on the message, and Bob uses Decrypt 3 to try and decipher them. Normally this would taken 3 hours, but Bob rolls his skill and gets two successes, reducing the time by half.

[Pulsewidth]

But in that case she actually has to send the message.

[Vebyast]

It's really, really hard to do technical stuff fast enough to keep up with four people writing nontechnical stuff. Eventually I'm going to have to stop with this remedial Design and Analysis of Algorithms course I'm trying to teach.

I feel like I shouldn't have to explain how impractical storing your information in a troll's anus is and why people do not do use that precaution for anything at all.

No, he got me. I deserved it, though, seeing as I was the one that brought up pencil-and-paper crypto from WWII.

If the only safety in your system is through inaccessibility, cryptography really doesn't matter anyway.

This is precisely why OTPs don't severely impact game play.

If you take your OTP away from your hard drive, you could just as easily have taken the hard drive away instead.

-Username17

I'll quibble with this. The power of OTPs is that they allow you to transfer security around between multiple items. The most common application is to use advantageous circumstances, like a face-to-face meeting, to create a single highly secure item that you use to impart security to smaller items later, on the idea that it's easier to keep the single highly secure item highly secure than it is to keep dozens or hundreds of small items secure while you broadcast them all over the place. Another scheme is to "split" a single piece of information into multiple pieces that all must be obtained to read the original, kind of like how parties will occasionally split up to ensure that half the party stays free to rescue the captured half. To continue our somewhat disturbing example, a properly-applied OTP lets you to stretch a single troll anus out enough to protect your entire communications building, and that's quite valuable if your troll anus is easier to defend than your communications building.

There's actually a mechanical issue here, now that I think about it. Multiple items. What happens when a player declares that they're going to write their letter in four parts and mail each individually? Is it one roll or several, either to protect the information or reveal it? Same thing applies if you try to hide something by breaking it into four pieces and hiding them all, or if you try to hide four different items in different places.

---

That is a snake that should be beheaded, not corralled

Even if we are forced to declare trollface somewhere in the setting, I think that there may be a better place to do it. Partially because it might be less off-putting elsewhere, and partially because we might want to use it for more than one thing at a time. I don't have a good example because we haven't done much other work on the mechanics, but I would be very surprised if we didn't need to "because fuck you that's why" another few things into or out of existence somewhere. If that's the case, we might as well be efficient about it; one trollface is acceptable, twelve in a row is not.

---

Humans are capable of dizzying levels of logical leaps (that turn out to be right) and intuitions that would make a binary computer have convulsions about NP problems.

I think we're starting to figure out how humans do those things, and it's actually pretty simple. Check out this paper for the original work. The authors use brain scans and optical illusions to argue that all that fancy perception and planning stuff runs on something called "hierarchical bayesian inference". Basically, your brain has a few models of parts of the world, and it plays with those models until they match what you believe about the world and observe with your senses. The parameters it eventually settled on then become your new set of beliefs about the world, which you use for decisionmaking, as observations for the next level of perception in the hierarchy, and as feedback for the next round of model updates. I'm currently working on using this for an integrated approach to robotic manipulation that handles everything from vision to touch to planning using the same observe-reproduce-believe loop.

---

If answering those questions in series is something that takes four hours, then answering the simplest possible question (a simple T or F "code", perhaps the challenge "Do you want to continue [Y/N]?") would still take nearly two minutes.

This is where your argument fails. If you can solve P = NP in linear time, just like addition, what you said is true. Unfortunately, it turns out that you're just not going to be able to get NP-complete problems down that low because the problems aren't structured right. Let's take "maximum clique" as an example: given a set of nodes, some of which are connected by edges, find the largest subset of those nodes in which every member of the subset has an edge to every other member of the subset. The size of the problem is the number of nodes in the set, but there could up to that number squared edges, and at some point you will have to deal with the existence or nonexistence of each of those edges. That makes max-clique at least O(n^2), which means that halving the size of the input makes you go four times faster. There are similar lower bounds in other places. Once you have some good lower bounds, you plug those bounds and run through the math of figuring out runtime and time complexity of modern algorithms, figuring out how big robotics problems are compared to crypto problems, figuring out how fast robotics would run compared to crypto if you used your minimum-runtime algorithm, and then figuring out actual runtimes. And when you do that, you get the results I've been describing to you.

As a side note, the important thing in a problem's difficulty is how much of the solution space you have to explore. Addition is &#920;(n) - just the time it takes to read in the input - because we don't have to do any searching at all and can go straight to the solution. Brute-forcing crypto keys is O(2^n), on the other hand, because you have to explore the entire solution space. What I'm doing above is relating the sizes of the original search problems to the sizes of the search problem at the heart of the P = NP algorithm and using that relation to transfer runtime estimates between problems.

Finally, if the only thing stopping me from doing this in realtime is a thirty-second pipeline on my supercomputers, then I'll just use them to populate datastructures offline that I can use later to make things faster. Instead of planning a single slingshot to Jupiter for right now, I'd plan sit down one day and spend a few hours planning ten thousand of slingshots for various situations, then select the best one at runtime and tweak it as necessary for execution. We already kind of do that; if you've seen Asimo demonstrations, those are choreographed down to the last joint movement weeks or months ahead of time. Things would just get shifted even further in that direction.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Even if we are forced to declare trollface somewhere in the setting, I think that there may be a better place to do it. Partially because it might be less off-putting elsewhere, and partially because we might want to use it for more than one thing at a time. I don't have a good example because we haven't done much other work on the mechanics, but I would be very surprised if we didn't need to "because fuck you that's why" another few things into or out of existence somewhere. If that's the case, we might as well be efficient about it; one trollface is acceptable, twelve in a row is not.

In that case, put it in an appendix, so you can say, "see Appendix T," whenever it's appropriate.

[DSMatticus]

If you're introducing decryption oracles, you need to give exact technical details of what they're capable

That is a four paragraph post and halfway through the first sentence I lost it. This is why I suggest "fuck your math" is something in the corebook we can point people to; there are seriously people who respond to plainly stated facts about the setting with mathematics arguments, despite the fact that this is obviously inappropriate and irrelevant.

The cyberpunk genre's origins are expectations and interesting exaggerations about the future dating from before I was born. It does not actually map to reality in any coherent way, and technology in cyberpunk really is just another kind of magic for all the sense it makes ("it works that way because it does"). I think that is a concept people are capable of handling maturely if you just are upfront about it, and if instead you try to build your setting/system as compatible with modern mathematics or without directly contradicting modern mathematics through a scheme of obscurity and abstraction (not saying abstraction is bad; abstraction is good and necessary for different reasons), people will not be capable of maturely handling that at all. The former fails because you will be wrong in some edge case or someone will think they have some edge case in which you are wrong, and the latter fails because despite your obscurity and abstraction people can point out very specific, very technical things they think should work and probably will do so when they think it benefits them.

Even if we are forced to declare trollface somewhere in the setting

How could we not, really? What you're proposing isn't really "not declare trollface," it is "hide the trollface in issues people are less likely to notice it in." And on one level, I get that. There are probably less people who will bring up faraday cages than there are people who will bring up cryptography, so that people can't leverage faraday cages to fuck with hackers is probably going to be a source of less contention than encryption failing. But at the same time, trollface is still totally there, there are just less people with a hardon for electrical engineering.

I see zero ways to create the typical cyberpunk setting without quite a bit of trollface, really. The only real disagreement appears to be whether it belongs in large, bold print at the start of the first chapter on technology or a fine print footnote somewhere inconspicuous. I can see both working, and while it will probably offend a select few people, I do think we can get more mileage more easily out of the bold print option, because it gives us the power to declare things by fiat (like we will with magic).

[Pulsewidth]

It doesn't matter how the trollface works, it's the fact that it's altering something as fundamental to reality as mathematics that's causing problems. I really doubt my communications protocol (only slightly better than ritually casting Mindlink) is the most broken thing anybody can come up with.

Faraday cages aren't nearly so bad. I wouldn't have a problem with mysterious hacking at a distance defeating Faraday cages. It relies on new physics that doesn't interact in any way with known physics. The trollface is safely isolated.

[John Magnum]

I think you would have a hard time finding a mathematician who gave that much of a shit about people shitting on math for the purposes of making an RPG. You learn about non-Euclidean geometry really early. You learn about the indeterminacy of the Axiom of Choice and the Continuum Hypothesis not much later. There's Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. It is fundamentally not actually that big a deal if you declare that in some weird way mathematics Works Differently. And even if the new way it works is actually inconsistent because some claim about cryptography you make is ostensibly contradicted way later by some claim about robotics you make--and this contradiction is indeed on the level of mathematics, not engineering or physics--nobody will give a shit because people accept all kinds of gameplay-saving white lies and nonrealities.

It's a joke when physicists turn D&D falling rules into an entire new theory of gravity and speculate on whether atomic bonding is possible in such a universe. Game rules are not supposed to be the rigorously consistent expression of a hypothetical alternate universe's math and physics.

Your sticking point of what real-world science is and is not acceptable to fuck over for the sake of a game is completely arbitrary and shitty.

[talozin]

That is a four paragraph post and halfway through the first sentence I lost it.

I think what he's saying is that if you have the ability to decrypt any conceivable encryption scheme in useful time, then what's stopping you from assuming an arbitrary encryption scheme and decrypting the Anti-Life Equation from the back of your cereal box? He's essentially making the argument that a perfect decryption method that isn't capable of failure and always decrypts the exact correct text is the master index from Borges' Library of Babel, and once you have it you can find literally anything.

I see zero ways to create the typical cyberpunk setting without quite a bit of trollface, really. The only real disagreement appears to be whether it belongs in large, bold print at the start of the first chapter on technology or a fine print footnote somewhere inconspicuous.

Cyberpunk is fundamentally a "because fuck you, that's why" setting and we should be careful not to confuse the ideas behind that setting with the ways technology has developed in the real world since that setting was introduced. We also need to be willing to punch people in the face if they demand exact technical details on anything in the setting, because that's a rabbit hole out of which we will never climb.

At the same time, I think the setting and the game benefit the less we have to tell people "because fuck you", and the more limited the class of things that we have to tell people "fuck you" about. "Fuck math" is kind of a large-scale thing, and I'm highly leery of saying it unless there is absolutely no alternative.

I get where you're coming from with troll's ass cryptography, but isn't this very conceptually similar to the guy who wants to be immune to hacking by turning off his cell phone? If the world is sufficiently connected that the only defense against hacking is to be more technically sophisticated rather than less, it doesn't seem logical for the best defense against plaintext recovery to be "and then I chisel my ciphertext into a pair of stone tablets and stick them in the Ark of the Covenant", and we should be thinking about how that can be circumvented regardless of how we deal with encryption qua encryption.

Also, I am hereafter planning to use "troll's ass cryptography" in real life, to denote methods of information hiding that are so awkward or uncomfortable to use as designed that they tempt the principals to bypass or shortcut them.

[Username17]

It's really, really hard to do technical stuff fast enough to keep up with four people writing nontechnical stuff.

It's actually really hard to take you seriously, because literally every time your supposedly technical dissertations impact in any way on basic calculus or biology (things I have a pretty good handle on, thank you), you are clearly and demonstrably full of shit. Some of the stuff that comes out of your keyboard is hard for me to assign a truth value to, but it 1) does not matter in the slightest compared to the needs of playability, and 2) your credibility quotient is super low. Let's give an example:

Unfortunately, it turns out that you're just not going to be able to get NP-complete problems down that low because the problems aren't structured right.
...
That makes max-clique at least O(n^2), which means that halving the size of the input makes you go four times faster.

First of all, you just told me how the structure of a problem "had to be" when it was set up in a way that was solvable in polynomial time even though no one knows how to set it up in a way that is solvable in polynomial time. So already we're at the point where the proper answer is "Go fuck yourself".

But secondly, even assuming for the moment that it had to have a quadratic component, there's no reason at all to believe that the quadratic component is the dominant portion of the time constraint within the projected range of potential inputs. For example, if the time was 36 minutes * N + 1 picosecond * N^2, then it would definitely have a quadratic component, but the each point of the linear component would contribute more than the entire quadratic component for all Ns less than sixty million, making the quadratic component completely negligible on all tasks taking four thousand years or less.

But thirdly, and perhaps most importantly of all, just because there's a quadratic component to the processor load doesn't mean that there's any impact at all to the real world timeframe from that quadratic component. We've already gone over this with chemical processors, where each round of processing takes a fixed amount of time whether you're doing one equation or 10^20th equations. So long as the quadratic component is contributing less than is required to force the user to do an extra cycle, the real world time it is contributing isn't just effectively zero - it's literally zero!

That's three strikes. Three immensely obvious strikes. The chances that you know what you're talking about are now very low. Probably negligible.

-Username17