Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker: Strange Places

[Vebyast]

I'd like there to be Quantum Entanglement Communicators instead, because extremely valuable objects that are unduplicatable and can talk to their twin regardless of countermeasures are the perfect MacGuffin

Doesn't have to be either-or. Ansibles that use entangled qubits have a finite capacity. Once you've consumed the ten qGB you brought with you, you have to physically fetch another batch of paired qubits if you want to start talking again. Magic Sendings, on the other hand, are basically free; they just have incredibly limited bandwidth and you can't hook computers up to them unless you're seriously awesome.

[zeruslord]

The problem with employing quantum computing as a future tech is that nobody really knows what version of the technology will end up scaling, and this makes a rather big difference in how fast and effective they'll be. The ansible is probably something we can get away with, but much more than that and you're getting into a space where some very smart people have no idea whether it is no faster than what we have now or whether it brings all of ecommerce crashing down.

I'm against importing stuff from After Sundown for it's own sake. The reason I was advocating for Xanadu as an underground kingdom is actually a passage from Coleridge: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / a stately pleasure dome decree / where Alf the sacred river ran / through caverns measureless to man / down to a sunless sea".

[Vebyast]

The problem with employing quantum computing as a future tech is that nobody really knows what version of the technology will end up scaling, and this makes a rather big difference in how fast and effective they'll be. The ansible is probably something we can get away with, but much more than that and you're getting into a space where some very smart people have no idea whether it is no faster than what we have now or whether it brings all of ecommerce crashing down.

Interestingly, once you get past a certain point in physics that entire paragraph flip-flops.

Entanglement does allow you to instantaneously transmit information, but only quantum information - you can't send classical information, zeros and ones. It's a pretty fine distinction, but important enough that special relativity is preserved despite the FTL transmission. Despite it being actually impossible, though, we can definitely get away with an ansible; it's a thoroughly established piece of SF tech.

Quantum computers, on the other hand, are just an engineering problem today. We have all of the math and physics worked out, and we've even run it on hardware for small n. We just need some fancy engineering to build the hardware capable of running it for real-world values of n. We also know that Shor's Algorithm is in BQP, which means that it's game over for modern crypto as soon as the engineers build a qomputer that can factor 2048-bit numbers.

[name_here]

Entanglement does allow you to instantaneously transmit information, but only quantum information - you can't send classical information, zeros and ones. It's a pretty fine distinction, but important enough that special relativity is preserved despite the FTL transmission. Despite it being actually impossible, though, we can definitely get away with an ansible; it's a thoroughly established piece of SF tech.

So, it's possible to send any information at all. That is enough for a communication system. Even the act of sending information or not is sufficient, because that's binary. If you can do quantum computing then you can convert quantum information into something actually usable anyway.

[Stahlseele]

Quantum-Telegraph. Wat?

[sabs]

Quantum morse code

[Stahlseele]

Basically . . No other combination between extreme high and extreme low tech . . FTL morse code . . lawl . .

[fectin]

Entanglement does allow you to instantaneously transmit information, but only quantum information - you can't send classical information, zeros and ones. It's a pretty fine distinction, but important enough that special relativity is preserved despite the FTL transmission. Despite it being actually impossible, though, we can definitely get away with an ansible; it's a thoroughly established piece of SF tech.

So, it's possible to send any information at all. That is enough for a communication system. Even the act of sending information or not is sufficient, because that's binary. If you can do quantum computing then you can convert quantum information into something actually usable anyway.

Erm, no. I have given you an unfair coin, you are allowed one flip. How unfair is the coin?
Also: I can change the probability of the coin at will. At an unknown point in the future, I will set it to 20% heads or to 80% heads, to transmit a 0 or a 1. You may flip it once, whenever you like. What number have I sent?

[sabs]

Well, A character I always enjoy playing is.

The Information Broker.
Medium Tech (geeared towards aquiring, processing, and maintainting information)
Medium Magic (Intelligo/Divination/Talking to Spirits/aura reading)

In vaguelly shadowrun terms.
Cyber eyes
Cyber ears
attention co processors
implanted computer with database systems for Customer Relation Management, and Data Management
Cyber/Bio Logic boosts
Astral perception
Magical logic boosts
Spirit Talk
Magic theory
Various Lores, both magical and mundane

[Endovior]

Entanglement does allow you to instantaneously transmit information, but only quantum information - you can't send classical information, zeros and ones. It's a pretty fine distinction, but important enough that special relativity is preserved despite the FTL transmission. Despite it being actually impossible, though, we can definitely get away with an ansible; it's a thoroughly established piece of SF tech.

So, it's possible to send any information at all. That is enough for a communication system. Even the act of sending information or not is sufficient, because that's binary. If you can do quantum computing then you can convert quantum information into something actually usable anyway.

Erm, no. I have given you an unfair coin, you are allowed one flip. How unfair is the coin?
Also: I can change the probability of the coin at will. At an unknown point in the future, I will set it to 20% heads or to 80% heads, to transmit a 0 or a 1. You may flip it once, whenever you like. What number have I sent?

THIS. That is basically exactly how it works, so far as we can determine. I'd add the sidenote that there's also actually no difference between 'checking if you have a message' and 'sending a message'; if you look at your qbits to see if you've received a message, and you have not, in fact, received one, you have just sent a random message and wasted all your qbits. Accordingly, at best, the best quantum communicators possible will be notoriously inefficient, since trying to send or receive a message permanently consumes lots of qbits that you can't get back without meeting in person and doing something really expensive... and checking your mail early destroys it, so you need to agree on fixed times in which you'll use your qbits ahead of time... AND the communication is fraught with errors at best, so the communication has to be repeated a bunch of times to ensure that the message gets through, since your message can only be understood statistically. Send very small messages, for preference; once all's said and done you're almost certainly paying somewhere on the order of hundreds of dollars per bits of data... since what you're actually sending are useless unreliable qbits that you have to send like a dozen times to be sure they get through.

And yes, this is a best-case scenario (ie: assuming that quantum communication is viable at all). But if it is, then hey... within those hefty constraints, you too can have instantaneous uninterceptable communications.

[Username17]

The trick for Quantum Communications is that you have a schedule of flipping and that informational bits are sent by flipping out of order. The information isn't the qubit values, it's the order of the change in qubit values. And you set that to be equivalent to a set of 0s and 1s.

Quantum Entanglement Communicators should exist. They can be weird and expensive and limited, but they are way too good a Maguffin to not include.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

Folks are going to be traveling off to the moon and mars and stuff too, right?

[Username17]

Folks are going to be traveling off to the moon and mars and stuff too, right?

Absotively.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Frank, Magic and Space. How do they correlate/work together/against each other?

[Username17]

Frank, Magic and Space. How do they correlate/work together/against each other?

A lot of magic is reasonably short ranged, and things in space tend to be very far away from each other. But you can still use magic in space, and the team Marilith won't explosively decompress if her magic comes into contact with vacuum.

But there should probably be another thread just on the paradigms of magic and the limits of technology. I'll get working on that.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Magic would make stuff in space CHEAPER because it becomes EASIER . .
Get a decent mage up to the moon, have him create a completely airtight cavern using magic. Use Teleportation tog et in and out. Get oxygen and other stuff in there. Have Spirits sustain Oxygenate Spells. Use it as a base camp to basically hollow out the moon.
And you won't need thrusters to get ships moving either . . just tell the mage to PUSH THIS IN THAT DIRECTION. Or use Movement like powers on them. This also makes starting from earth much cheaper . . as soon as you have movement going, use magic to amplify it . . you basically only need enough fuel to get lift off for some feet and let magic do the rest . .
Or, using teleportation, get stuff into orbit and assemble it there.

[Username17]

Teleporting to the moon is never ever going to happen. The moon is 30 times farther away than anything on Earth is from you at any time. That is not hyperbole, that is the actual number.

In Shadowrun, magic is great for getting to space because telekinesis works out to line of sight. But it's terrible for being in space, because your magic stuff explodes if it leaves the gravity well.

In Frank Trollman's Cyberpunk Fantasy Heartbreaker, those assumptions are not true. Magic does not explode if you leave the safety of the atmosphere, but it is also limited by D&Dish ranges for the most part. So Deep Ones would use teleportation to minimize the need for opening and closing air locks, rather than for getting to and from the Moon.

But yeah, I guess it is totally time for a new thread.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

I'll be waiting.
I like reading your stuff.
Even if i don't understand it most of the time <.<

[Endovior]

The trick for Quantum Communications is that you have a schedule of flipping and that informational bits are sent by flipping out of order. The information isn't the qubit values, it's the order of the change in qubit values. And you set that to be equivalent to a set of 0s and 1s.

Quantum Entanglement Communicators should exist. They can be weird and expensive and limited, but they are way too good a Maguffin to not include.

-Username17

Uh... no. You've missed a key point, here; qbits are an expendable resource. Any time you do anything at all to a qbit, even simply observing it, the waveform collapses, leaving it in it's final state. Once it's there, further observations of either qbit will no longer affect it's twin. That's how you use it, and using it in any way at all uses it up. If you're particularly clever (and the maths for this are really really obnoxious), you can send your qbits through a precisely calibrated field that tilts the odds a little bit in one way or the other... but once you've done that and statistically flipped your qbits, you can't un-flip them; the link is one-use only, and it's already broken. You can't just look at your qbits and check which ones this has happened to either, looking at your qbits is the same kind of interaction as using a field. In fact, using a field to set your qbits is also looking at them; it's just looking at them in a special way that, for weird reasons that take too much math to causally explain, causes them to appear in a biased fashion that might allow information transfer.

There's actually good evidence to suggest that this last doesn't actually work (ie: that quantum communication is impossible, because it would violate locality)... but if we ignore that and pretend it does work anyways, it'll work in the weird and finicky ways I've outlined. Which, again, doesn't mean that we've got an unusable technology; far from it. What it does mean is that you've got a technology that's got the following practical factors to it:

Any time you're using a quantum communicator, you must:

1: In advance, exchange qbits; which requires a big powerful expensive machine. Each set of qbits needs to be carefully shielded from isolation... requiring some nontrivial equipment; enough qbits to send a cute picture of a lolcat would probably need a semi to haul them in. Not, of course, that you'd want to waste hundreds of thousands of precious qbits on sending something so vast as a lolcat picture.
2: With each set of qbits, list a specific time at which the recipient is allowed to look at the qbits, since observing them at all beforehand will wreck them. If you like, you can totally carry multiple sets from multiple different people or whatever; but you can only receive each set at a specific time, because if you the receiver don't follow the rules, the guy on the other end may not have sent his message yet, leaving you with scrambled qbits and no message.
3: Keep your messages as simple and to the point as possible, since you need to leave a big error margin to avoid statistical anomalies distorting your message. You may not encrypt your messages (or at least, not without dramatically multiplying your error margin and accepting a large risk that your message will be unintelligible to the recipient), since your message must be robust enough to survive simple mistakes, and by the disjunction rule you must expect an error at least as bad as a simple typo in each message despite your precautions, and are likely to find something notably worse (which will totally fuck over any encryption complex enough to be worthwhile). You could, perhaps, encrypt the box that you keep your qbits in... but any protections that you place on the box itself are ultimately defeatable, since the whole point of the box is to isolate the qbits from outside influence. The worst you could do is have a panic button that manually scrambles the qbits if it suspects unauthorized access, but the rules of the system allow you to get around that kind of thing, given sufficient effort. Ultimately, qbits are only as secure as their physical security.


What does this mean to the player characters? It means that any organization that's trying to use quantum communicators is continuously, and on a routine basis, hauling around all kinds of physical boxes containing unencrypted secure information, and you can totally just steal that.

[name_here]

At no point until the communicator is used up will the physical boxes contain every message that will ever be sent by the system. Also, finding the received messages (Assuming that the receiver does not memorize and destroy them, like every spy receiving unencrypted information ever) does not allow you to then impersonate that guy.

Now, it is quite possible the recipient will store the data unencrypted, because they are in a doom fortress coated in Faraday cages and if you want to break in you will require an armored division. Or they're in space. Neither of those are exactly conducive to breaking in. They're also not conducive to radio, which would be why they use quantum communicators in the first place.

[Vebyast]

At no point until the communicator is used up will the physical boxes contain every message that will ever be sent by the system. Also, finding the received messages (Assuming that the receiver does not memorize and destroy them, like every spy receiving unencrypted information ever) does not allow you to then impersonate that guy.

We don't need to hammer out the technology, given that we're building a mid-soft SF/Fantasy setting. Once we have the technobabble we just create rules for it that make sense. I think that having unencrypted messages sitting in the qubits is a bad idea, sure, but having your opponent's qubits is still a really really good thing. For example, let's say that I manage to steal the qubits that Home Base is using to talk to Mata Hari. Now, not only does HB have to get another box of qubits out to MH if they want to talk to her, if I have the schedule I can read every transmission she sends. Frank got the bit we care about exactly right, even if his paraphrasing of the real science is a bit too soft:

Quantum Entanglement Communicators should exist. They can be weird and expensive and limited, but they are way too good a Maguffin to not include.

[Endovior]

Well, here's the deal.

You can't encrypt a message you're sending over a quantum link, because quantum links work statistically, and statistical information will have errors, and any encryption that is fault-tolerant enough to survive the process is also obvious enough that you can break it easily. Now, there's nothing stopping someone from erasing the messages off their quantum communicators after receiving them... indeed, the moment the message is read, you can simply scramble the qbits and save it to (encrypted) memory.

The trick is, though, that if you have one box, and the guy on the other end does not know yet, and he sends his message because he doesn't know yet, then you've got his message. In any situation where encrypted radio-like transmissions are unfeasible, that means that anyone who can't get a 'those qbits were stolen' message sent in response to the theft does not know they were stolen. Traditionally, this would be because of speed-of-light limitations; this is highly relevant stuff at lightyear distances. At more moderate distances, where you're using them to bypass Faraday cages, it's more likely that your enemies will get any messages relevant to stolen qbits... y'know, if you steal them in such a way as to make it obvious that they were stolen. The perfect theft of qbits is one where you sneak in and replace the boxes you're trying to steal with boxes that look the same but hold inert, random qbits... then neither party can possibly know anything is wrong, aside from the fact that they're not receiving coherent mail, which could have any number of explanations. In this case, the explanation is that you've stolen their mail. Heck, if you wanted to be really quite exceptionally clever, you can steal their qbits and replace them with a box of active qbits connected with your own homebase; and then you can not only read their mail, but you can send them disinformation too.

The crux of the problem that leads to all this is that qbits are expendable; you're physically transporting future data, not active bandwidth that can be regularly messed with. Accordingly, anyone trying to use quantum communication is seriously doing these runs all the time, since there is a physical bulk limitation on the maximum amount of messages you can send with any one box.

[jadagul]

Endovior: the great thing, though, is that every one of those caveats sounds like a good thing. Not for the people using the qbits, but for the game design. Because you've just outlined like three different types of missions characters might want to go on.

[name_here]

Yeah, in no way are any of those game design problems.

And while they're a reason to avoid using them, the fact that they're untracable, uninterceptable, instantaneous, and unaffected by intervening matter, is plenty of reason to use them, because if they are not stolen they're perfectly secure. Plus they're good for communicating with Mars without having to deal with like a billion transmission problems, and it's not like anyone is going to go to so much effort to interfere with the march of science... except some groups that can hire spellcasting cybernetic ninjas.

I mean, those reasons are why they make a perfect MacGuffin, plus the fact that you can't just steal any communicator, you need to steal that guy's communicator.

[Username17]

You can't encrypt a message you're sending over a quantum link, because quantum links work statistically, and statistical information will have errors

No. There is no data transfer protocol that has ever existed that does not contain errors. We still totally manage to send encrypted information. It's a thing that happens. It happens all the time.

The people who are saying that you can't send information superluminally because qbits are statistical simply do not understand anything about information theory. Wireless transmissions are statistical already. And yet, I am totally using them right now. It's not even hard.

I don't want to get into the nitty gritty of whether or not you can reuse qubits or how many qubits you need to do different tasks or any of that. Because any speculation we do now will look stupid and ridiculous in five years and stupid and ridiculous for a different reason five years after that.

Resolved: Quantum Entanglement Communicators are expensive black boxes that securely send information instantaneously across interplanetary distances. They are used because they can send digital information of low information density and because they cannot be intercepted save by physically breaking into one end or the other and getting the black box or by intercepting the message before it has been sent or after it has been received.

Most communication with Mars is done with magic, since you can easily make a real-time conversation happen with magical sendings. This causes people to have the interplanetary communication system from Star Wars, where you stand in a magic circle and use the Force and a shadow of the Emperor shows up and harrasses you. But for the really important stuff, you have communication rooms that instantly and securely communicate with other communication rooms elsewhere.

-Username17