Hacker News Reader

Comment by droffel | Hacker News Reader

Law operates under the assumption that an idea called color exists. Computer scientists, for their job, generally must assume it does not. Color is a sort of Metadata property of something (an object, data), and in this case, the color of the illegal number pertains to how it was derived (where it came from). If the number is 'tainted' in its origin by having been influenced somewhere in its past by the offending illegal number, then it too can be illegal. A good explanation for this is below:

https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

tl;dr yes. An illegal number multiplied by two is illegal. Randomly generating that number is not. The illegality is not strictly a property of the number itself, but it's color.

View on HN

What about I randomly generate a number, add it to the illegal number to get a result. Is the resulting number illegal or not? (Thinking about it mathematically, the resulting number's distribution isn't really affected by the illegal number - Maybe we can practically find something by taking a lot of generated numbers and analyzing the apparent distribution)

Another idea is to generate a random number and multiply it with an illegal prime. If the illegal prime is a sufficiently large number; we can extract the original illegal prime with very high confidence by just finding its prime factors and picking the shortest one.

If you distribute a derivative of an illegal number, that derivative has the color of that illegal number. Whether anyone notices is a different question. The moment one of the intermediate steps involved the illegal number, the following steps gained it's color.

So too for addition then. An illegal number + 1 is illegal. An illegal number - 1 is illegal.

Therefore all numbers are illegal.

I believe you misunderstood my comment. Numbers who's origins are tainted by an illegal number can be illegal. Numbers who's origins do not have taint from an illegal number are not. It is not the number that is illegal, it is it's color. How it came into being, it's history, a permanent invisible mark that it carries with it, and transfers to whatever it touches.

You can't just dodge color by mutating the number via mathematical operations, color doesn't work like that. You can only get rid of the taint by using a fresh number without taint.

Yes.

If there's an illegal number X and I give you a number Y with the intention that you obtain X from it by some transform then Y is also illegal because I "tainted" it when I did the original transformation from X.

If I just need Y (or X) for some operation that's not related to the "illegality" then those numbers are not illegal.

The essay that droffel linked to explains this very well.

> Numbers who's origins are tainted by an illegal number can be illegal [..]

Two thoughts:

1. This appears to show a complete disregard for basic mathematics...

and

2. Do lawyers ever wonder why people make jokes about them?

It doesn't disregard mathematics at all. Quite the contrary — it separates mathematics from the intent of the mathematician.

The number itself isn't illegal, because it can come from any number of contexts. What's illegal is wilfully working towards generating that number while knowing its purpose as a key. It's just the principle of Mens Rea at work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com