alt Hacker NewsI didn't know what Cantor Dust was, and had to click through a few different search results to get past all the abstract descriptions and begin to form a basic idea.
In a nutshell, I understand them as a sort of "blockie" for binary data formats. Things like WAV audio files, bitmaps, ASCII text, machine code, etc. each generate their own distinct visual signature (but different examples within any of these categories tend to generate similar signatures). So once you learn the "blockies" for different types of data, they really pop out when content is viewed this way ("hey there's an image buried in that sequence of 1's and 0's!").
The explanation on this page isn't bad, and the bitmap example near the bottom is particularly illustrative (once you've seen the reference image for bitmaps earlier in the page):
https://inside.battelle.org/blog-details/battelle-publishes-...
My armchair-expertise here is only about 20 minutes old, but I hope this helps someone else looking for a starting point to learn about them!
Replies
Fascinating, thanks for sharing. A candor dust guessing game would be pretty fun to play
This is excellent!
An absolutely great link!
Not so much for the hacking (White Hat, Black hat, other-color-hat) aspects (although they're certainly there too), but for the
visualization of higher-dimensional mathematics aspect...
In other words, have a look at the following URL's, then come back here:
https://gods.art/articles/equation_shadows.html
https://kettenreihen.wordpress.com/
See, there's Math (which typically generates graphs, graphics, other visuals), and then there's Higher-dimensional Math (you could almost call it 'Meta-math') -- which generates graphs about graphs, graphics about graphics, visuals about previous visuals...
That is, take a math equation that generates a graph. OK, so a simple example is that we could take the derivative... That generates a second graph which gives us information about the first graph... a "graph about a graph", so to speak, a "signal about a signal", information about the original information...
Point is, Cantor Dust looks like another great mathematical tool in any Mathematician's and/or Computer Scientist's and/or Engineer's visualization/understanding toolbox!
Oh sure, bad faith actors could use it for hacking (bad faith actors could use aspects of Isaac Newton's Calculus for hacking in various contexts, heck, any mathematical tool could be exploited in specific contexts!) -- but those people I'm sure, would not have an appreciation of the sheer mathematical beauty of such things! (Why use it to hack, when you can admire the mathematical beauty?)
Also, I should point out that humanity as a whole is far from discovering every single possible method, every single equation, every single way to visualize higher dimensional mathematics...
In other words, Cantor Dust is one such method... there will no doubt be many more in the future (I'd love to see fractal visualizations of higher dimensions!), and of course, we still have yet to understand all of the "old" previously discovered math in terms of all of the possible ways it can be used to visualize higher dimensions...
Anyway, great link!
AFAIK it is similar to how Enigma got cracked, due to certain variables always being the same (end of letter greeting, date, etc.)
See also ECB penguin [1]
[1] https://words.filippo.io/the-ecb-penguin/