ThePanda

Me am sorry 4 not publishing nething yesterday afternnon, but I was honestly very very busy with ZE DAMN COMPETITION, promise me was busy.

A long, boring day of judging a mismanaged event is finally over. Not only did my friend and source of transport turn up late, but he left earlier than expected, leaving me stranded at DPSVK and forcing me to call my poor old dad, who hadn’t even seen the damn place till today….. Neways it
suffices to say that the event was bad, the programmers were okish, the softwares were even worse, and I didn’t get pizzas 4 lunch. Since i’m kindda bored with the entire thing in itself, I’ll just let it be….. (though Ze Panda was very unhappy abt not getting his due share of pizzas, & further saddened by the lack of innovativness & basic respect 4 the users working conditions in the softwarez supplied by ze participants).

Ummm earlier today the ESA’s Mars Explorer launched the Beagle 2, a little probe expected to land on Mars & perform surface studies. Now what makes the Beagle 2 interesting, specially for sci-fi fans is that its sole purpose in life is to search for traces of extra-terrestrial life. Now interesting the US has also launched not one but two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, to determine if liquid was present for large, continuous long durations of time, as that serves as a pretty good prelim check for carbon based life-forms. Unfortunately its slightly extreme to expect that all life-forms in the universe wud be carbon-based or even perform the basic functions that we use to define life. After all most multicellular organisms r in essence swarms of cells, which work together to keep a person alive (ya even Panda’s are a simple swarm of cell, saddly not some high-tech new form of life) & well me thinx that ne mission to explore or search for extra-terrestrial life wud be ultimately futile unless we can come up with a more generic version of what life is, something which doesn’t require that we see a spitting image of rselves b4 we declare something to be livin’, somethin’ that takes into account the fact that carbon-based life forms may not be the only kind which inhabit this vast universe. I guess in the coming yrs life like intelligence (imagine, they can’t decide on who 2 call intelligent, HELL PANDA’S R SUPPOSED TO BE LESS INTELLIGENT AS COMPARED TO CHIMPS.. Lets c some goddamn chimp trbl Software Display participants as much as I did today) wud become an extremely debatable topic. Already there is a curve which defines how humans react to humanoid robots, and it says that initially when robotic faces begin to look more & more human we react positively and accept these robots, however beyond a certain pt u hit a gorge right abt where the robot’s face becomes very similar to a humans but still has certain unresolved flaws (since it looks like a monster to us or something) & eventually acceptance peaks when u have a perfect robotic face. However this peak acceptance is lower than expected, becoz a mechanical equiv of us hurts r egos, since it makes us closer to machines than we wanna be. Now considering that we basically don’t have a proper defn for life, and further considering that we r already scared of such simple mechanical creations, I don’t c how a future controversy on the defn of life wud actually help ET’s cause….....

Coming back to most earthly matters, I ran into this guy today, who believed that the Enigma cipher is uncrackable and the only reason the damn Brits managed to crack it was because they (and the Poles) managed to get hold of the machine and more importantly the code book. Well this is as untrue as rumors abt Mr. Einstein copying his papers from a panda, and a chimps brain being used as a processor on the ENIAC, or DPSVK serving pizzas to its judges… Well initially the Brits did need the Enigma machine, and the code book mostly because they had to study how the damn machine worked… Now the Germans like the good little intelligent ppl they r changed keys often, besides the sheer volume of intra-European traffic made analyzing all messages on a single (at most 20) Enigma machines impossible. In essence the Brits got the Poles to make nice little comp-predecessors called Bombes (in French and Bombs in english but in the present climate writing Bombs on a blog may get me bombed) which they used to decrypt their message. The keys were still manually calculated. For the SS Divisions they were calculated by comparing weather conditions with cypher-text received at particular hrs of the day (the Germans were very punctual and all in sending their data), and for U-Boats, the Brits used to place ships in certain grid squares and since they pretty much knew their ships were, every time U-Boats broke radio silence to transmit coordinates among themselves, the Brits kindda knew what they were transmitting. Now this guy and a lot of other guys made their own encryption algorithms which they haven’t really revealed or discussed with neone. Now even the best mathematicians don’t use encryption algos without passing it thru a peer review process, ‘coz there r a lot of ways to cryp-analyze ne encryption algo and well u really wudnt wanna sell an unsecure algo as a secure one. I don’t c the pt of coming up with new algos symmetric or otherwise since there r already r plenty of algos out there, most of them relatively secure for the tasks these guys wanna use it for. Furthermore the security of both guys algos mostly depended on keeping the algo secure. Now algos, programs, the shopping list of the yr, names of girlfriends/boyfriends r easily found, because u can easily find a way to get them, which is y sometime in the early 1800s some great guy had announced that An encryption algorithms safety shud lie in the safety of the key not the algo. Now this guy wud have been more famous if n apple or n anvil wud have fallen on his head, or if he wud have constructively spent his time creating fine timepieces as he was trained to do, but well his laws important. So now its been abt 200 yrs since he gave his law and sadly none of these damn fools seem to be taking it into consideration….

A few of my friends r gonna be taking part in a few events at DPSVK tomorrow and well I kindda wish they win, since that’d pretty much put my school on top in the pts tally, and give us the overall trophy. While I trbl guys from my skool at least as much if not more than other skools, I do like 2 c them win, just that I expect more from them than I do from others…...

Ze Panda
Hoping that DPSRKP wins DPSVk’s event, and seething at not recieving a pizza & at the pathetic quality of software entered by everyone, specially DPSRKP.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2003 at 1:41 pm and is filed under article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.