Am 10.11.2010 17:44, schrieb [email protected]: > I haven't read the entire thread and I don't intend to. The whole > concept is so bizarre that I could not read it without thinking of the > worst most evil bosses and environments I have worked on, and none of > them even come close. > > It does remind me a bit of what I have read about "computers" back in > the 1930s, and especially on the atom bomb projects. There would be a > project leader who would have to break some formula down into little > bitty steps which could be famed out to people running calculating > machines. There would be a page of steps. The first few numbers > would be filled in; each computer (being a human at this time) would > follow one specific line, say 17 being the sum of 10 and 6, and pass > the sheet on to someone else. Presumably hard problems had many > pages, and someone would copy final numbers from one page to beginning > numbers on another page. > > Not only did the steps have to be simple, they had to parallelize as > much as possible, so multiple sheets could start at once, only coming > together for the final calculations. > > But what really made it fascinating was that for anything secret, > whether the atom bomb or mere commercial trade secrets, one of the > goals was to make sure that no one who worked on any single sheet > could have any idea of the overall project. You never put units on a > sheet, never used familiar constants (5280 feet per mile), never ever > ever let anyone have any idea what they were doing other than > repeating line 6 + line 10 yields line 17. I would imagine that if > you wanted to multiple miles by 5280 to get feet, you could split it > into two steps on different sheets; one multiplied by 264, the other > by 20, but probably more obfuscated. >
That reminds me of its modern successor: Secure computation [1] In a nutshell: Do arbitrary computations with data from different organizations who do not want to share their source data with each other. They only want to share the final result. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_multi-party_computation
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