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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

And these are precisely the things, which we know little, that the NSA may be exploiting with extreme effectiveness that scares the shit out of me.

I recall an article from 2005 that described a system that could track BULLETS IN MID FLIGHT over a vast swath, in-the DARK, which provided detailed view in all ballistics in a fighting theater....

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It's probably not of much use to the NSA where breaking encryption requires precise math that will fail quickly if operations are off by 1%.

I can however see lots of application in various pattern analysis techniques based on machine learning. There's lots of places in those that a bit of fuzz won't really matter, at least for first pass filtering.

Similarly voice recognition would probably have to deal with far larger errors from the transmission and capture of sound anyway.

Just because it's not good for decryption, doesn't mean it isn't good for the overall set of NSA operations.

Yeah, even human brains can do voice recognition, and they're noisy as fuck.

For floating point operations sure, but if I understand it correctly it could also provide a speed advantage to other operations. It means 1% of the operations will be wrong, but what does that matter when it allows you to search 10,000 more keys. Perhaps you could get even more speed up with specialized hardware for decryption, and then buy rooms full of them.

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