Evidently, I exist.
In fact, I KNOW I exist.

This particular bit of philosophy ("Cogito Ergo Sum") stems primarily from Descartes way back in the 17th century¹. Anyway, it's a bit of a tricky statement to make. For one thing, you need to prove that you have perception, which is quite obvious, but impossible to prove without a priori knowledge. More concisely, it's not entirely self-evident that an object which has the property of perception exists. Please excuse the connotations of the word "object" as a flaw of English and not a fundamental flaw in the counter-argument.

This extends to other things. As you mentioned, you really can't be sure of the reliability of your senses, a view called Solipsism. As Descartes argued that for all you know, a malicious entity he called the Evil Genius could be manipulating all of your senses to give you the illusion of an external world.

To sum it up: Existence is like quantum mechanics: both true and not true if not known for sure. I know I exist, but I don't know for sure that anything else exists, therefore you both exist and don't exist in my mind, and I both exist and don't exist in your mind (or what I believe is your mind). This is supported by the fact that our brains fill in the gaps of limited sensory information, causing perception.

Be very careful with making analogies to Quantum Mechanics, particularly with regard to interpretations of it. In this case, many physicists would vehemently argue that the notion of superposition of states is meaningless as an actual state. To use Schrodinger's cat, they would claim that speaking of the cat as either alive or dead is meaningless until you observe it to be so.

However, your point does have merit. I don't know if you realized this, but you can't encapsulate the notion of "partially true" in classical logic. It's neither solely True or solely False, just like a computer that can only represent 1 or 0. However, there are non-classical systems called fuzzy logics that have an entire sequence of values of "truthiness", just like a quantum computer has an entire range of values between 0 and 1.



¹ aeTIos, he had been dead for over a century by the time the French revolution occurred...

Also, it says on my signature that I am a TI-Planet admin.
Where is the admin panel here ?

* adriweb runs

Top bar > Admin > Password > Sidebar > Ban Members > "Sorunome" > Enter key

More of an idea than a specific algorithm, but Secure Multi-party Computation. Quite possibly one of my favorite pieces.

Blum Blum Shub (no free links, sorry). It's a cryptographic random number generator of the form: x_n+1 = x_n² mod M, where M is the product of two large primes. Each iteration can produce a max of two bits (!) of random numbers, which can be done via the following: (parity(x_n)*(x_n & 0x01))*(parity(x_n+1)*(x_n+1 & 0x01)). Alternatively, you can just take the straight parity or the least significant bit of the output and get one bit per iteration.

*cough*

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I'd highly recommend that everyone calm down before this gets out of hand and I have to hit the fluffy pink LockThread button

Whatever your feelings of <insert device name here> and its manufacturer, discuss them as you might the weather.

Clock multipliers can easily push you up and over the terahertz barrier. So, while we don't have any crystals that frequency and hence no lasers

We actually have lasers several orders of magnitude faster than terahertz frequency. Once you get into the nanosecond range and below though, lasers tend to use mode-locking to generate such short pulses, which is almost certainly how the laser here works. The downside is that such lasers tend to have huge bandwidths, which hinders a lot of their potential applications.