I have recently spoken to a number of reporters, as you might expect Some were from the on-line media and some from the print media. Both types of reporters asked good questions and in general we had an interesting discussion. But one or two asked a question that I really had trouble answering. The question was not an obvious ones like: what is polynomial time, or what is NP. The question was:

Why is proving PNP an important result?

The trouble I had is simple: if most believe that PNP is true—perhaps obviously true—then why care if it gets proved? Yes, it is a famous problem, with a large monetary prize. No doubt whoever first proves the result will be showered with many awards and honors. But, still why the huge interest in proving something that we know is correct?

My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and leadership necessitates the presence of others—the people you’re leading.

(…)

But it seems to me that solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.

Can a machine accumulate enough information about your patterns of communication to create an effective digital doppelgänger? Could we use the data left behind on Google’s servers and our own hard disks to effectively replace ourselves with an artificial intelligence born and bred of our online conversations and quirks? What might it be like to have a conversation with a past representation of ourselves, what would a hypothetical exchange between two digitally-reconstructed individuals look like?

(…)

The goal was to build an autonomous chat bot that would draw from the content of our logs to construct an infinite stream of back-and-forth conversation between our younger selves. Ideally, these conversations should be reasonably cogent and reflect whatever personality / themes we left behind in our logs.

Presented at Black Hat USA 2009

This document contains a security assessment of the IETF specifications of the Internet Protocol version 4, and of a number of mechanisms and policies in use by popular IPv4 implementations.