Saqib Ali writes:
> This is interesting:
> http://tinyurl.com/2zko7n
>
> Abstract
> The problem of a mice traveling through a maze is well known....
>
> The problem finds its origin in the problem of secure multiparty 
> computation....

This was presented at Crypto this year. It was interesting that they were
able to reduce this secure MPC problem to a very concrete graph coloring
question. However they did not include the motivating example about the
doctor visit, and just presented it in terms of MPC over non-abelian
groups. I had the impression at the time that it was a pretty abstract
problem. It's not clear to me how the doctor problem can be expressed
as a non-abelian group operation.

The one thing I understood from the talk is that the abelian group case
(commutative and associative) is trivial. You want to do Z = X op Y, so
you break X up into shares such that X = X1 op X2 op ... Xn and the same
for Y1..Yn. Then the first guy does Z1 = X1 op Y1, and so on, and they
all combine their results: Z = Z1 op Z2 op ... Zn. This trivially gets
the right answer, but it doesn't work with non-abelian groups because
you can't rearrange the terms. So they build a graph that shows how
shares get joined, and that eventually leads to their coloring problem.

Hal Finney

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