Cryptographers discuss wisdom of 'foolishness'

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>>Have you ever done anything foolish and has your doing something foolish, in the end actually turned out to be a wise thing? Who'd like to be bold enough to field that question first.

>>I've rarely done anything else. laughter One of my favorite talks is the wisdom of foolishness and I start off by saying you've invited me here today because of my reputation in cartography and the irony is that while no one wants to appear foolish, particularly in a place like Stanford, I got here and you invited me because I did something, literally all my colleagues told me was foolish, which was to work in cartography back in the early 70's and until we had good results that was the uniform attitude. And they had two very good reasons, NSA had a humongous budget, we didn't know how big in those days. They'd been working on it for decades. How can you hope to discover anything they don't already know? And if you do anything good, they'll classify it. And both arguments came back to haunt us later, the first one more related with the GCHQ claims and information and the one, they'll classify it, there was a conference in October 77 at Cornell where, on the advice of Stanford's general counsel, I gave the papers instead of two of my students because there was some concern we might be arrested for delivering the papers and yet in hindsight you have to say it was very wise to be foolish. And again I'd say I've hardly done anything else. That's where you really do good work is to do things that are foolish and most of the time they don't work out but occasionally you hit, why I call, a fool homerun.

>>I think in the sake of precision it ought to be pointed out that the law we were being threatened with at Cornell, and incidentally I went out of the way, I happened to have a paper scheduled, I went out of the way to give a rump session talk with thumb on nose because I was younger and more foolish. But what we'd been threatened with was export control. Classification, except in the atomic energy area, doesn't purport to grow out of anything except contractual arrangements.

>>There is a style of foolishness which goes on in the theory community which I think has some wisdom behind it too. We often assume that what we know now is the best that can be done, P is not equal to MP because we don't know how to solve any problem in MP or we think this problem will take 40 quadrillion years because we don't know any better, you know or things like this. So I think it's helpful to make foolish assumptions like that explicitly. To know when you're basing a cryptosystem on some assumption that you know we're just, we don't think we can do better than this and it crystallizes an open problem for somebody to solve. And that's a kind of foolishness which I think has merit. It's often wrong. We often find better algorithms, as we just saw with the knapsack algorithm or the factoring algorithms but one has to be foolish and step out there and say well lets draw the line here and say if this is the best we can do then we can leverage it this way, cryptographic purposes.

>>I did a quick mental calculation and I have to admit that I'm about 99 percent foolish because every moment, you know as a scientist, I go to my office and I decide to work on a hopeless problem, something which people have looked at for many, many years without success, something which is a very, very long shot and about once every three months, 100 days or so, I have a good idea, but in the other 99 days I come in the morning , I decide to work on something and I make no headway whatsoever. And that's just normal in our profession and surprisingly I'm sure that my employer could have hired someone who would be 100 percent wise, every moment he would set himself such a simple task that he will succeed at the end of the day in achieving whatever he set to do. And for some reason they prefer me over the other guy. laughter

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