Grrl Power #1035 – Keymaster race
Mele Kalikimaka had been stuck in my head for a week. I apologize if I earwormed anyone else.
In reality, anything involving four possible entries would never give you good security options. (Because there’s only four nucleotides found in DNA?) Eight character passwords using only lower case letters can be cracked so quickly today that the time involved is basically negligible, and Deus is talking about something that works out to 64^3 there at the end, which is only 262,144. If each entry can only be G, A, T, or C, then multiply 262,144 by 256, and you get just over 67 million possibilities. A modern computer can rip through that pretty quickly.
However, we’re not talking about straight up computational encryption busting. As Dabbler guessed on the previous page, the superion field only reacts to sapience. Having a print out of every combination doesn’t do you any good, you have to implement it in something with DNA in just the right sequence. Unless you’re a geneticists with just heaps of discards, you’re not going to just stumble across this, especially if you’re just genetically engineering fruit flies or something else without sapience. Even then, human superpowers don’t show up right away. It mostly happens around 8-12 and they take a while to develop.
Edit: As usual, I’ve outsmarted myself and fucked up the math. Deus is proposing a structure that is 64 rings, each comprised of 64 possible entries, each of those entries has 64 levels. Sort of a 4D tumbler, where each “number in the combination” is actually like one of those gym locker locks with 4 rotors, but instead of having 10 numbers, it just has the 4 nucleotides from human DNA. 4 rotors times 4 repeatable entries is 4x4x4x4, right? 4^4 = 256. 64 rings of 64 positions of 64 stacks, or 64^3 = 262,144 possible configurations. Then I just multiplied 256 by 262,144 for ~67 million and change.
BUT, while the above math itself is correct, the “word problem” I used to formulate it isn’t. The problem isn’t 4^4 x 64^3. That would work if we’re talking about turning a dial on a safe where there’s only one right answer per dial. The way I framed it in the comic, ALL 64 entries of 256 possible combinations on ALL of the 64 stacks of 64 disks have to be correct. I can’t even figure out the formula for that, but there’s been more than one suggestion that it’s 4^(64^3). According to the Windows calculator, the result of that figure is “FUCK OFF.” It’s probably one of those “more than the number of atoms in the universe” numbers.
So when Dabbler says “a pretty solid encryption key,” it might be an understatement. Honestly I might have to revise Deus’s figures just a bit, cause that seems a little extreme.
This is all assuming he’s telling the truth, though. :D
I keep forgetting to promote this: The kickstarter for Tamer 8 is up! It has already comfortably made its goal, I think it did that in the first few hours, but I’m letting you know so you can get the book and extra goodies if’n you want as soon as everything is available.
New incentive is up! Dabbler decided to get out of the pool, in slow motion (see the bonus comic at Patreon), possibly with added “physics.”
Cue Mele Kalikimaka.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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to quote the universe from first contact “behold, humanity”
Ah another gentlebeing of culture i see!
Deus’s core power must be something to do with information, either by getting information that’s concealed or information from the future (or something like that). It’s absolutely the only way that he can figure this out, and it explains so much else about his behaviors in previous episodes; he knows a lot of what’s going to happen (though perhaps not all) so he can position himself perfectly to take advantage. He also seems to be smart enough to actually know how to actually take advantage, and isn’t in a hurry to do everything at once.
I like this theory. While mathematicians do like to scramble data and visualizations, finding this connection is still an extremely tricky proposition. If he could please solve P=NP next?
Or Deus is simply Nyarlathiothep, which, given his bodyguard is and eldritch abomination, would make sense.
Dabs mind is blown because a mere human noticed that an encryption exists in the universe, seems to me that the first thing to do with any information that doesn’t make sense to see if there was an encryption on the information.
Dabs is freaked out because no one had thought that the final “field” was encrypted which means that sometime in the far past someone created these fields and wanted to keep the dumber races from figuring out how to use them! Plus now humans have been the secret to the final equations this whole time so yeah she’s is shock that it makes sense now etc… And the explanation of why supers exist is laid bare….
It also seems that this field was hidden, only accessible through the key or keys and Deus just happens to notice the one sitting on the keyring as it were. Which all feels very artificial. So definitely the work of a high tier civilization depending on how far the field extends. Likely the whole galaxy at least. Some major civilization creating a physics altering field extending over their territory for whatever reason, and one that can produce powerful enough results to encrypt it. Usuat you see this sort of thing as the source for magic and spells and such are the bits of code , usually stumbled upon by younger species. That said in this series to two seem related but with magic the more accessible of them along with psionics and supers being the hidden one.
“Final” field? Frankly, upon finding out that there was a quantum field that was encrypted so that you wouldn’t even notice it without the key, that there was only one such field would NOT be my first assumption…
“the first thing to do with any information that doesn’t make sense to see if there was an encryption on the information.” – Scarsdale
That’s the point. All the information she has did make sense, so there was no reason to go looking for any steganographed layers. It’s like being given proof that, somewhere unexpectedly early in the umpteen-millionth digits of pi, there’s a long sequence of nothing but 0s and 1s – and that its length is exactly the product of two prime numbers – and that when you plot those numbers on a rectangular grid, the 1s form a perfect circle…
The only field they hadn’t cracked couldn’t be deciphered by the “intellectually advanced” races… hmmm maybe no one considered the possibility that that it was encrypted since the others were “easily” understood and that an encryption would mean that some greater race from eons past did so to “test” the newer races just like learning FTL would allow new races to join the galactic transit system lol.
the trick is, you don’t think to look for a key when you don’t even know the treasure chest exists.
Really like this, and I want to make it easier for someone searching the page; Carl Sagan’s “Contact”.
Of course the “key” is hidden in human DNA, so very few would even have access to a sample to examine, and for the most part they don’t find humans exceptional enough for them to look that intensely in the first place, if at all.
The fact that humans are the only ones with “supers” is just an anomaly of some kind, and due to it’s rarity even in humans, it seems more likely to them that something else is endowing humans with super powers, and it’s not inherent in humans. I’m sure there are lots of anomalies out there, and this is a pretty small scale one on the galactic/intergalactic scales.
Until just recently, even knowing about supers, the aliens still didn’t rate it’s power level as all that incredible as they have entire races with equivalent or superior abilities, though some needed technology to do so. The new revelation that at least one of those supers is able to take down a powerful combat vessel is bound to be a real shocker to them.
Deus did a pretty good job of leading Dabbler to the conclusion he wanted.
I kind of doubt he’s lying about it, he’s to egotistical and convinced of his own superiority to fake something like this.
Of course he could be mistaken, but I doubt it, his narcissism and over blown ego wouldn’t let him show this kind of world shattering revelation to the protagonists unless he was absolutely sure.
It serves several purposes for him, not the least of which is a massive deterrent against attacks, but he gets to tweak the heroes with this info, as well as really mess with Maxima. :D
Gee, Dabbler…must hurt kicking yourself with a cloven foot.
Dave… this bit has been four pages now of talking head exposition. Something I seem to recall you declared that you hated early on in the comic’s life, which is why you would fill the panels with more interesting stuff when people were expositing. But this is even worse than the usual talking head exposition, because each page has essentially been “blah blah technibabble blah fake science blah some meaningless math blah blah.”
It is very hard to stay engaged with that! :/
Meanwhile I am finding this a fascinating look into the world building of the series. Also someone will complain when there is a long battle or long talk, so not every thing will make you happy all the time.
I’m guessing that’s why he threw in the boyfriend’s labcoat glamour for the ADHD readers.
tee hee… boobies..
But seriously though, I’m a Trekkie. I like expository technobabble.
So if I, all powerful rich alien, want access to this field, I need to enslave humanity?
Why does this seem like a bad thing?
Or figure out what in humans is opening the lock and use protein nanobots to artificially produce and implant a key into either your own people or bio Androids , clone supers is also a cheaper option.
Definitely the second option. As Dabbler pointed out long ago with her argument about asteroid mining being easier than invading a nuclear-armed society. Humanity spread to the stars centuries ago, why try to run an enslavement program (and restrain superhumans no less) when the raw DNA material is so readily available?
Just send mosquito drones to Earth, collect blood or skin samples from 99.9999% of humanity, and send special sample collection teams for the supers who are immune to mosquito bites and whose skin doesn’t fall off their bodies like all normal humans’ does.
The Dr. Gero approach works out pretty well, especially if they can identify some prime super targets (like those publically known who frequent a central location), sample DNA, and then clones or bio-androids later.
now I am reminded of what Cora said about Nth tech being discovered starting wars over it, and that was just about Sidney’s orbs, which as far as anyone knows are unique and she has the only set not found on a Nth’s toy shelf beyond the edge of reality or whatever. However finding out Supers on Earth may have a decryption key for a Nth tech produced special amendment to the laws of reality that once accessed grants new sources of power that don’t require spells like magic does, operating more like psionics. THAT is something to want to fight over access to, especially if it can be replicated as easily as getting some blood samples.
So perhaps this is information Deus and Archon may want to sit on and not tell the greater galactic community about or else risk starting a galaxy wide arms race.
Yes, Deus knows more than alien super genius Dabbler because he’s just that brilliant and wonderful. If his superpower isn’t information-based there’s a real problem with him.
Hmm, actually yes all his skills could be given to a quantum computing brain, a Cypher power, depending on how loosely you want to go with it everything is “language” its just hitting enough patterns to learn the language that is the key.
Deus never said he made this discovery, let alone by himself. His superpower is money; we’ve already seen that his team built an updraft tower and a stargate, and Archon just came inside from watching a prototype demonstration. Deus is just presenting the findings of his R&D team, who are no doubt very capable individuals, he just gets the credit for assembling and funding them. And probably keeps 100% of the patents.
Alternatively, if he did have an information super power, it could explain how he got that money. If one invests all ones money on the stocks that are going to have the biggest rises tomorrow, you can get very rich very quickly.
reminds me of a bit where a casino in a supers world forbid cyphers and quantums from gambling *one can predict patterns and the other has luck probability shifting*.
His superpower might be extreme administration – simply assembling effective teams of highly competent people, keeping them motivated, focused and on-task.
Yeah it’s like a Deus Ex Machina or something. =P
Yes, greater than the atoms in the universe.
4^(64^3) is equal to 2^(2^(2^(2^(2… for a total of squaring it 19 times, which is computationally a *lot* faster to calculate.
It’s approximately equal to 2.60*10^157826.
Fun fact: The reason modern computers can try billions of passwords per second is because it’s comparing against a list of MD5 hashes. Make those, say bcrypt hashes, and suddenly it’s only *thousands* of passwords per second… And that’s in an offline attack, where the hacker has acquired a list of password hashes from the server. For this, they would be forced to do an *online* attack- that is to say, they would be forced to submit each input to the server… Or in this case, physically construct and test, which could slow progress down to single digits per second or, since powers don’t appear very often, single digits per *decade* per test subject. And considering the number of possibilities… Just like a randomly generated 16 character alphanumeric password containing special characters, it’s functionally impossible to breach within the lifespan of the universe.
Encryption is different, yet also the same- you either have the key, and can retrieve the encrypted information, or you don’t, and you can’t. And if the key can be all those different possibilities…
Completely aside from how using the wrong encryption key won’t result in a simple “fail”, just bogus information, making a wrong key much more difficult to discern, *especially* if you don’t know what’s stored or what format it’s in.
Wait, maybe Earth is the computer that someone made to try and crack the code? Something something 42?
It always amazes me that people don’t put a 120 or 500 msec delay between each try at entering a password. You and I would never even notice the hiccup, but an interrogating black computer would.
Or is this too complex for coding?
Competent programmers do, and they limit the number of failed attempts to under 10.
“… limit the number of failed attempts to under 10.”
Yes, that would effectively prevent a Drive-by DoS.
Abort Retry Fail
You know. If the nth race, or whoever encrypted the field were inorganic or energy based critters that did so due to a rivalry (say supers old ones vs magic old ones), you might wonder if life was seeded across the universe as a way to try and brute force the development of keys to break into heaven.
(Imagine an arms race that culminated in one side altering reality by force) the other side placing themselves Into hibernation and seeding life to work the lock unknowingly while they slept, waiting for the stars to align
Anytime I see math manipulations like this my bullshit detector won’t stop going off.
Run the data through Formula-A, then run the results through unrelated Formula-B…
then through Formula-C; D; E ; F; G; continue till you get to Formula-X.
As we can clearly see from the results of these calculations the answer is “Chicken Soup.”
You can take any data set and with enough manipulations make it look like literally anything.
Is there a chance Deus and his people actually figured this stuff out? Sure, but I’d wager there’s a 99% chance he’s BS’ing the whole thing for money and power.
It is going to be soooo obvious when Dabbler figures it out.
A *space* wizard did it.
I believe they prefer the term Jedi.
I get to coin Sitheryn! A long time ago in a Harry Potteresque universe, with laser wands and robotic house elves…
laser swords and some cosmic force yes, being some celibate space monk not so much LoL
https://antiotaku.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/tenchimuyo05.png?w=584
http://images.shoutwiki.com/bzpb/thumb/9/9f/Washu.jpg/300px-Washu.jpg
Maybe it’s not the field that’s encrypted. Maybe it’s sapience that’s encrypted. How can you tell which side of the filter you are on?
Ego!
By computing 4^(64^3) in log-space, one can circumvent calculator limitations.
Log4(#combinations)=64^3. Divide by log4(10) (change of base formula), and this becomes
Log10(#combinations)~= 157826.414367. Now apply 10^(both sides), to get
#combinations = 10^157826.414367 = 10^157826*10^0.414367 ~= 2.60*10^157826.
Hubris, thy name is Xuriel.
Working in log-space can allow us circumvent calculator limitations to compute 4^(64^3).
log4(#combinations)=64^3. Using change-of-base formula, we divide by log4(10) to get
log10(#combinations) ~= 157826.414367. Then, raising 10^(both sides), this becomes
10^157826.414367 = 10^157826*10^.414367 ~= 2.596*10^157826.
As far as The number of atoms in the universe is ~=10^80. Thus, if one replaces every atoms in the universe with a copy of this universe, then replaces every atom in that meta-universe with a copy of this universe, etc, and repeats the process about 82931 times, then the number of atoms in that ultra-universe would be the number of possible combinations.
Neat. Well, we know there are godlike ancient intelligence in this setting from DaveB’s page comments, so this isn’t a [i]complete[/i] surprise.
Question(of many) is, why is he telling them all this?
There’s near-zero odds he can recruit them, he’s just arming a rival power with powerful information.
Expecting them to unwittingly do something useful to him with it? Going to propose some joint project? Is he leaving something critical out?
if I can get my rivals (with whom I also work with…see Archon and Machina Industries partnership back in the states) to also have the same base data, they can work on it independently, maybe see some other angles, so there are now two rival branches working on it trying to beat the other, in his position he can gather this intel later and profit from both sides.
Also, again, technically his company works with Archon despite this whole Galtyn situation. So he tells Archon *and by extension the US government* he can do this, they work with him on it to try and gain exclusivity rights to the research to mass produce supers later.
Wow, David, I am impressed. It has been decades since I studied non-Euclidean geometry or group theory. Spherical geometry I remember but almost nothing of hyperbolic geometry. Although I figured you just made up a comic term I Googled “Hurwitz Surfaces” just to be sure. To my surprise they are quite real, are multi-dimensional and include the Klein quartic curve (AKA, Klein bottle). Adolf Hurwitz was a German math genius born in 1849 and whose seminal work is the foundation for much of modern mathematics. Your reading list and comprehension belies your public persona! It seems, David, that you are sandbagging us, at least with your math prowess if not a lot more!
While it has been years, math was part and parcel of my physics degrees yet Hurwwitz makes my head ache! For example, the abstract from a doctoral dissertation on the Geometry of Hurwitz Surfaces is an “easy” intro to the complexity of the subject:
“A Riemann surface of genus g has at most 84(g – 1) automorphisms. A Hurwitz surface is
one for which this maximum is attained; the corresponding group of automorphisms is
called a Hurwitz group. By uniformization, the surface admits a hyperbolic structure
wherein the automorphisms act by isometry. Such isometries descend from the (2,3,7)
triangle group T acting on the universal cover H.
We develop a combinatorial approach which leads to a classification of the conjugacy
classes of hyperbolic elements of T, arranged by length. This allows us to study the
closed geodesics of Hurwitz surfaces by performing calculations in the corresponding
Hurwitz groups.
We identify the systoles and other short curves on most of the Hurwitz surfaces of
genus less than 10,000. We also determine which of these surfaces are chiral and which
are amphichiral. In addition, we show that certain families of closed geodesics are
simple on every Hurwitz surface.”
Google “On the Geometry of Hurwitz Surfaces”
Roger Vogeler, June 26, 2003; Florida State University Libraries
At some point the comic became less about superheroes and their activities and got lost in the weeds describing how everything and anything works/fits together/originated (even when it is completely unnecessary.) I feel like if I stopped reading for 6 months, I’d come back to find the story moved approximately three days, and still going into the complexities of political-economics and alien/magical effects on them.
Testing. Why previous post did not appear. Delete if it does.
Man this is making me feel dumb
I am Vinz Clortho, Key Master of Gozez
So? There’s only two numbers actually used by computers, yet we do manage some pretty decent encryption with them.
And that’s why you hear of “2048 bit encryption”, because it’s all ones and zeros. Two thousand and forty eight of them, to be exact, or 256 bytes or 128 “words”, though that latter term is usually given as “hex”, meaning sixteen bits to a double byte – which is exactly the same thing. In bits.
Ah, I dream of tristate circuits, that would let me have zero, one and two!
Early tri-state simulations were 1,0,-1, no twos. Believe me that’s more than enough.
YEAH!
Puny Earthlings: 1
Snobby Space People: 0
I need to use the word epicycloids more in conversation.
they do however look like a Spirograph. just saying.
i never knew doing those was doing physics
For the record, this is the the sort of thing that number theoriests daydream about. Or abstract algebraists, except in their daydreams you remember not to refer to it as a ring of rings. Maybe topologists or probabilists. Other mathematicians? Not so much.
(Oh, and likely also math historians. If there’s anything they DON’T find interesting, I don’t know what it is.)
Good stuff. Gave me shivers. :D
Actually, the encryption format would allow for a near-endless assortment of resulting field effects depending on how the specific DNA pattern interacted with the force network. Also, assuming most humans have at least a near-match to the base pattern, a bit of gene therapy might unlock whatever “power” their specific DNA code is attuned to.
But what happens when the Keymaster Race meets the Gatekeeper Race?
Hmm. Simulation hypothesis. Check. The universe is a simulation or game. Plausible.
Cheat codes. Check. That rules out a straight simulation. This is definitely a game.
Billions of years of self-optimizing evolution, across billions of planets, eventually finding the cheat codes. Plausible.
‘Idealized’ human form would be quasi-explainable as genetics that express cheat codes. Not very plausible but okay.
So humans are a race of auto-generated NPCs that were accidentally generated with access to the game’s cheat codes. Somewhere there’s an eldritch Outer God whose job is Software QA, and we are its worst nightmare. If it gets around to fixing the bug we’re probably in trouble.
Alternatively, it could #NOTABUG this “unexpected feature” and start structuring the game around Earth as the Big Boss Fight. And if that happens we’re also probably in trouble.
Also? This sort of explains Halo’s Balls. Supers’ access to the cheat codes is intrinsic. But actual players can’t have direct intrinsic access to cheat codes. Instead, they need an interface that allows them to do things that are within the rules – but which use some kind of access to the things that the cheat codes are there to allow. So while all the other supers are instances of a software bug allowing NPC’s to spontaneously develop access to cheat codes, Halo is actually playing the game using the same interface that a non-cheat player would.
Now, why is she able to do that? Somehow the game mistook her for a player. Or maybe a player-character died out there in the ocean and left a treasure drop intended for other players to find but this NPC came along first…..
This could be it,
of course Halo could be a player, suppressed memory and none-universe presence/power suppressed for a full immersive experience.
Someone has to be the guinea-pig to check that there aren’t any interaction bugs between the ‘Player’ and ‘NPC-intrinsic’ versions of the interface. Better that the first run be done by an NPC if possible, that way you don’t lose a Player if it all goes interestingly wrong.
Hey Dave? I calculated the answer to 4^(64^3).
In round numbers, you can call it 2.59637056*10^157820. I mean, I have all 157820 digits, but I don’t figure you really need an exact answer here.
It’s what we call a really really big number.
Python has no problem with it –
starts with “2596370567” and ends
with “6185773056”
So what happens when you have 6 fingers on each hand and your race develops a base 12 math system?
You know, the otherwise ho-hum 2000 movie Red Planet had a few miliseconds of genius in it. Here’s one;
“I realized science couldn’t answer any of the really interesting questions. So, I turned to philosophy. I’ve been searching for God ever since. Who knows, I may pick up a rock and it’ll say underneath, “Made by God.” The universe is full of surprises.”
4262144 = 2.596370567 E+157826
I’m not mathy enough to know what E+Anything means but I’m sure some of you guys can go ‘holy hecc’ about it :o
It means 10 tot the power of.
Looks like Demons aren’t the superior race you thought they were, eh Dabbler? kek
When you get numbers that big, turn to logarithms for a sense of the scale.
To give you an idea, I was recently thinking about storing logarithms of prime numbers, because it’s much faster to subtract than to divide. This would make factoring tests for primality much faster. As a thought experiment, I imagined storing 2^64 primes would be doable… at the cost of a little over a billion dollars, with no redundancy. Doable, by a major government, if there was a practical need.
I started worrying I might’ve found a way to crack RSA encryption quickly. The 2^64th prime would be somewhere around 2^70, per the prime number theorem. Sure, it might take a long time to test against 2^64 primes by subtraction of logarithms, but it’s doable in linear time once you have the logarithm of the number you’re trying to factor. (Which is a pretty big deal!!)
Then I looked up again the size of the pseudo-prime numbers RSA uses.
2^1024, minimum.
At which point I just laughed at myself. That would require something like Dyson sphere infrastructure to do in linear time — lots and lots of linear time — and if you’re really that worried about it, just extend the pseudo-primes to 2^2048 or more.
But yeah, logarithms could give you the idea of the numbers you’re talking about pretty quickly, no floating point overflows necessary.
It’s amusing that just this week, there have been news reports suggesting that information isba quantum field…
So if there’s a decryption key …
Is there a password?
And what does it unlock??
[Insert dramatic music sting here]
it unlocks the ability to use super powers.
Or access to the simulation parameters file.
posing as a wizard, always a fun choice, more amusing (or frustrating) depending on your approach if some actual spell casters realize you are not actually following the rules of magic and can “cheat”.
although this seems a case of limited access, some subconscious link up to certain types of abilities or the specific isotope or whatever in the genome leans towards opening specific ability files or reality program assets (which would explain why so many super powers are environmental based).
Those last two panels …. Seems to me rather like Dabbler has just had the combination of a religious epiphany and a major “Uh-oh” Moment.
well Cora did say it was Dabbler’s idea that a Nth tier species could exist (and logically there could be more than one),
so this could be a case of
“Ah Hah! I was right there are hyper dimensional beings capable of manipulating the fundamental laws of physics…wait…oh shit…there ARE hyper dimensional beings capable of manipulating the fundamental laws of physics; and they HAVE.”
Dabbler just found god. Literally.
Through this guy, coincidentally named Deus