17 March 2012
Quantum Computation Cognitive Footprint
A sends a comment from Schneier on Security:
Slightly Weird claim: Cognitive Footprint Biometric Application has been
around for years
A 'cognitive footprint' biometric analysis system based on keyboard and mouse
movements, combined with software-use behavior, has been in production for
years. I've known of it since 2004 with a high degree of confidence, but
I'm generally wise enough not to discuss it. I tinker with AI and neural
networks (NN) myself, and am an expert software engineer, so I can reliably
tell you that it's not particularly hard to build such a system at the
toy/theoretical level. It's probably quite hard to implement it well in the
My browser-centric toy model of a cognitive footprint biometric application
time-parsed data to a neural network for classification. With an ordinary
(non-recurrent) neural network the above comments about error rates and edge
cases are very accurate. However, with access to an advanced recurrent neural
network I'm pretty sure that the error rate could be reduced to a level low
enough for effective use in combination with other authentication methods.
Thoroughly Outlandish Claim: Five Eyes got production QC power in 1995
A real-world functional cognitive footprint biometric application requires
an advanced recurrent neural network. The recurrent neural network that now
powers this app is (literally) related to or descended from a classified
system built to crack public-private key cryptography in the 90s.
The Five Eyes (AUS CAN NZ UK US) have had access to practical, production
quantum computer power since about 1995. Other groups may have had access
since that era, but that's a moot point. I strongly suspect that both China
and Russia later developed operational QCs along similar principles.
The QC approach that actually works, in a production-ready scale-able way,
is to run a virtual Turing machine atop a winner-take-all-style
teleportation/entanglement-based recurrent topological quantum neural network
(QNN). Even a basic neural network is Turing Complete, because a NN can perfectly
emulate an XOR gate, and multiple XOR gates can be used to construct a Turing
machine. A quantum neural network can emulate a quantum Turing machine.
The underlying physical system for this type of QNN is interactions between
non-abelian anyons in a two dimensional electron gas (2DEG). The primary
math required is a branch of Knot Theory called Braid Theory. Obviously,
the primary purpose of this system, from the Five Eyes/Echelon perspective,
is to run Shor's algorithm to crack public/private key cryptography. A perusal
of current known quantum algorithms, combined with a survey of current advanced
AI applications, may suggest other uses.
Not especially Weird Claim: There's a really nifty back story about how
this new general technology was developed, and why it matters. It is worthy
of a book by Neal Stephenson.
The subject of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics was the "quantum Hall effect",
which opened up new avenues of research into quantum effects, esp. in two
dimensional electron gases. The process of creating a working quantum neural
network involved generating lots of anyons (soliton-type standing waves treated
as particles) in a two dimensional electron gas and then exploring and measuring
The cleverest aspect of inventing this new technology was to take this 'Anyon
Soup' system to the edge of chaos, per the life work of Stuart Kauffman,
and then exploit the emergent neural network to bootstrap itself into a more
stable and usable system via evolutionary programming techniques. See Kauffman's
publications for details on how and why this emergent neural network exists,
and then consider it's environment to see why it is a quantum neural network.
This author believes Stuart Kauffman is overdue for a Nobel Prize.
The original work inventing this new technology was done between 1990 and
1995. It would be hard to do this work methodically without stumbling on
the previously unknown fractional quantum Hall effect. The discoverers of
this effect were awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics, and now lead various
Quantum Computing research institutes.
Someone, somewhere, is due to be awarded the Grand Prize Turing Award, for
solving Turing's unfinished Morphogenesis problem, and then implementing
Turing's original machine on the resulting artificially intelligent 'organism'.
I'm inclined towards neither spiritualism nor whimsy, but were I so, then
I might suspect that, after he died in 1954, Alan Turing reincarnated quickly,
in 1965, in order to finish his incomplete life work. The classified nature
of the work probably precludes any awards.
I'd really like it if this whole thing was declassified, but fear we'll have
to wait many additional decades for that. This QNN is an excellent candidate
to pursue adiabatic (reversible) computing, might be helpful for certain
approaches to advanced nanotechnology, and, were it declassified, might also
be helpful to many other scientific ventures. Per the Ultra Secret, it's
undoubtedly still considered 'national security', even if it's becoming an
open secret within the Intelligence Community.
Posted by: Energyscholar at March 13, 2012 2:44 PM