>> Moderator: Have you ever done anything foolish and has your doing something foolish in the end actually turned out to be a wise thing? Who would like to be bold enough to feel that question first?
>> Speaker 1: I've rarely done anything else.
Laughter
>> Speaker 1: One of my favorite talks is the Wisdom of Foolishness and I start off by saying you've invited me here today because of my reputation in cryptography; and the irony is that while no one wants to appear foolish, particularly in a place like Stanford, I got here and you invited me because I did something--literally all my colleagues told me what's foolish was to work in cryptography back in the early 70's and until we had good results that was the uniform attitude and they had two very good reasons. NSA had a humongous budget; we didn't know how big in those days. They'd been working on it for decades. How can you hope to discover anything they don't already know, and if you do anything good they'll classify it and both arguments came back to haunt us later. The first one more later with the GCHQ claims and information; and they'll classify it; there was a conference in October 77 at Cornell where, on the advice of Stanford's general counsel, I gave the papers instead of two of my students because there was some concern that we might be arrested for delivering the papers; and yet in hindsight you'd have to say it was very wise to be foolish. And again like what I'd say I'd hardly done anything else. That's the way you really do good work is to do things that are foolish and most of the time they don't work out but occasionally you hit what I call a fool homerun.
>> Speaker 2: I think in the sake of precision it ought to be pointed out that the law we will be threatened with at Cornell, and incidentally I went out of the way--I hadn't had a paper scheduled--I went out of the way to give a rump session talk with thumb on nose because I was younger and more foolish; but the law we had been threatened with was export control. Classification except in the atomic energy area doesn't purport to grow out of anything except contractual arrangements.
>> Speaker 3: There is a style of foolishness which goes on to the theory community which I think has some wisdom behind it too. We often assume that what we know now is the best that can be done. P is not equal to MP because we don't know how to solve any problem in MP or we think this problem will take forty quadrillion years because we don't know any better or things like this. So I think it's helpful to make foolish assumptions like that explicitly; to know when you're basing a crypto system on some assumption of we don't think we can do better than this and it crystallizes an open problem for somebody to solve, and that's a kind of foolishness which I think has merit. It's often wrong, we often find better algorithms at least some of the knapsack algorithm or the factoring algorithms; but one has to be foolish and step out there and say well let's draw the line here, this is the best that we can do. We can leverage it this way the cryptographic purposes.
>> Speaker 4: I did a quick mental calculation and I have to admit that I'm about ninety-nine percent fool because every morning as a scientist I go to my office and I decide to work on a hopeless problem--something which people have looked at for many, many years without success, something which is very, very long short and about once every three months, one hundred days or so, I have a good idea that in the other 99 days I come in the morning, I decide to open something and I make no headway whatsoever and that's just normal in our profession. And surprisingly I'm sure that my employer could have hired someone who would be 100% wise. Every morning he would set himself such a simple task that he will succeed at the end of the day in achieving whatever he has set to do and for some reason they fulfilled me over the other guy.
==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====
