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Friday, July 03, 2015 - 22:47 SGT
Posted By: Ham H. Let

Just Dropping By

[Under the basement of a spanking new hospital]


Lookin' Good, Bebeh!


Mr. Ham: Howdy, Mr. Robo! All hale and healthy, I see! I've brought you a fruit basket. Let's have a look at... eh, the staff left a clipboard propped up against your nether regions. *squints* "Doctor's Orders: Please do not pat, poke, drum, shake, slap, squeeze in a friendly manner, touch in any way, or otherwise come into contact with, the patient's affected area. Yes, that means you, in case you were wondering."

Mr. Robo: Oh, the nurses knew you were coming.

Mr. Ham: *huffily* And after all I've done to set up this facility for injured hamsters! Do you even know how complicated it is to burrow while piling work is ongoing? Or to arrange it so that we've got a tunnel to the main supply storeroom? Not like we have got good PR, like those blasted felines. *picks an apple out of the basket*

Mr. Robo: I'd prefer not to have to mention it, but I wouldn't have needed to be here, had somebody bothered to give me the correct handphone number.

Mr. Ham: *chomps into apple* Yes, yes, blame me again. This is what you get for trying to give others a leg up. *looks over at Mr. Robo*. Okay, two legs up. Fine, I'm sorry, yeah? So what can I do to make it up to you?

Mr. Robo: Well, I suppose it's the thought that counts.

Mr. Ham: That's my boy!

Mr. Robo: ...but would you by any chance be willing to let me bounce a few ideas off you?

Mr. Ham: Okaaaayyyy...

Mr. Robo: Yay! Actually, I was just chatting with the human, but he's gone offline. Lots of new tech news coming through recently - the humble umbrella's been re-imagined, bionic eye implants promise better than 20/20 vision, and YouTube's just introduced user-rotatable 360-degree videos. Here, have a look. *passes laptop over*


Oppa Oppa

Mr. Ham: *peeling a banana* My word! To be frank, I was never totally sold on this new-fangled "technology" craze, but I suppose I could be persuaded.

Mr. Robo: It's the future, ham. *flips through papers* And about helping out the human with his research... the hot flavour of the month in deep learning appears to be the discovery that neural networks can be kinda-generative too. I do expect recurrent networks to be one of the next big things - and perhaps neural Turing machines, once someone figures out a killer app for it. So far, we've got, uhm, a Hardwarezone EDMW forum simulation by a local student, as well as a Magic: The Gathering card generator.

Mr. Ham: *munching on papaya slice* So interesting.

Mr. Robo: *enthusiasticially* Yeah, isn't it? It's always enlightening to consider new advances in their historical context. Notably, no-one seems to have tried comparing the neural network hallucinations with some take on old-school texture synthesis, for example, or by plain statistical modelling. Likely wouldn't be that... psychedelic, though.

In some sense, much the same basic concepts might be considered for the text content generation too. Recall our keybi key-prediction system from a few years back, for one. Eh, maybe the human could take advantage of this to finally finish up the third set in his M:TG series...

Mr. Ham: *plucking grapes* Quite fascinating, my dear boy. And, um, that's about it for your "tech" roundup, amirite?

Mr. Robo: Oh, no, I left the best for last!

Mr. Ham: Crap! I mean, do go on.

Mr. Robo: Recall last month, when we raised the possibility of a distributed computing solution that preserves the security of both the client data, and the server code? Well, it turned out that a team from MIT posted their white paper on the subject to arXiv a couple of days after that, which has more recently been picked up by popular news outlets.

Times being what they are, the proposers of Enigma have also been pretty active in explaining it on Ycombinator and Reddit. Basically, much of it is built on prior theory in secure multi-party computation, in particular the SPDZ protocol - I'm sure you'd be willing to listen to the details, Mr. Ham?

Mr. Ham: SSSS.

Mr. Robo: Yup, Shamir's Secret Sharing is referenced too! Why, I didn't know you were conversant in the field, Mr. Ham!

Mr. Ham: *dismissively, while swallowing a strawberry* Mr. Robo, I am a f**king expert.

Mr. Robo: Anyway, the project seems to be some way along, but just a small comment - while I have little doubt that they'll get it right, and that it might in time be as big as PGP, I'm still unsure as to whether the code is sufficiently protected. Or more generally, is it possible for a third processing party to receive an encrypted data string and an also-encrypted program string, and produce a result string that is decryptable only by the data owner? Of course, it'd probably be more expensive than homomorphic encryption, so in practice perhaps a probabilistic solution based on relatively weak data encryption, but plenty of confounding noise, could be more fruitful. Worth a thought, I'd say.

Mr. Ham: Oops, that was the last grape. But, it's a nice basket, you've got to admit.

[To be continued...]



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