Sunday, June 1, 2014

Let He Who Has Understanding

Last night, I read the passage in the Revelation in which reference is made to "he who has understanding." It states that only that person/entity is able to calculate who the "beast" (the Antichrist) is based on a number, 666 (sometimes rendered 616). One way to turn names into numbers is gematria, Hebrew numerology, the forms of which are so numerous and generally so entropical that they could be used to "prove" anything.

An interesting observation was made in a discussion of this verse: If it requires understanding to do the calculations, then it shouldn't be terribly obvious who it is referring to. Some might use this as an excuse to go crazy with obscure gematria, but I have another idea. Gematria and hashes in general are irreversible (in that you can't be sure you got the original value even with a collision), but there's one computational basis in which any operation can be reversed: quantum physics.

It would certainly require quite a bit of understanding to break a hash using a quantum computer. I have no idea what the input would be or what hash "666" is an output of, but that could be brute-forced too, with things like Grover's quantum search algorithm and quantum parallelism a la Deutsch. The universe keeps uncountable numbers - vast complex matrices - as a "scratch pad" when advancing time, inaccessible to us. There could be a wealth of knowledge about the universe and the destiny of the human soul bound in these stealthy numbers.

No comments:

Post a Comment