Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

The technology for all this progress was a huge discovery in 2009. But what if it is a dead end, that nothing originating from that discovery will ever be practical?

Like wouldn't it be preposterous if someone said, "Here Craig Gentry, take $1 billion to run enough computers for the current FHE schemes. What is the snazziest demo you can run?"

View on HN

FHE isn't the only option. Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption can be fast and stupendously valuable for a lot of statistical operations where you can figure out how to compute your function off only a small number of multiplications.

Some of the newer schemes are much faster. The recent progress feels like deep learning in 2010, right before everyone realized it worked

> The recent progress feels like deep learning in 2010, right before everyone realized it worked

Does it work, though?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/crypton... (2016)

> We demonstrate CryptoNets on the MNIST optical character recognition tasks. CryptoNets achieve 99% accuracy and can make more than 51000 predictions per hour on a single PC. Therefore, they allow high throughput, accurate, and private predictions.

It’s starting to, yes, in particular for machine learning. There is a yearly competition called iDash where people show the performances of their homomorphic schemes. This year should be very interesting

If they keep that name it will be a dead end.

That’s life

It will join the graveyard of technologies was that rhetorical?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com