asciilifeform: mircea_popescu's point re: orcs is well-illustrated in the mega-compendium. observe how the crackpots who can barely string coherent words together, actually sit closer to the dirty truth than the 'educated' folk
asciilifeform: which is the case for virtually all symmetric ciphers
asciilifeform: and by cheating in your wolf form, when larger (e.g., simulated annealing, eldritch magic such as evolutionary compute, genetic algo, etc)
asciilifeform: by brute force, when very very small.
asciilifeform: '1. Someone proposes a scheme based on Hard Problem X. X looks strong, but the resulting scheme either is too slow or has gigantic keys. 2. Someone else comes along and proposes a related scheme based on Hard Problem Y which, having more structure, allows for either smaller keys or faster computation. 3. Later turns out this extra structure also helps the attacker.'
