bigmachine-io/imposter-v2

Code and Issues for the Imposter's Handbook, Season 2

imposter-v2's Issues

Feedback - PDF 1.0.0 (Imposter's Handbook, Season 2 v1.0)

Thanks for writing this book, I really enjoyed it. Here's some feedback:

1. Page 11 - remove the spurious "v" after - "question the nature of God."
2. Page 21 - a word is missing after the word "if" - "The first two cases are easy: if is true, then the expression is true."
3. Page 22 - replace the lower case "i" in "indeed" with an uppercase "I" - "indeed, satisfies this condition."
4. Page 22 - a word is missing after the comma - "indeed, satisfies this condition."
5. Page 26 - add "in" between the words "else" and "terms" - "This is called Base 10 numbering, since ten is the number of individual digits, or radix, that we express everything else terms of."
6. Page 32 - the following sentence - "In the simplistic, semi-perfect world of Newtonian physics..." - implies that Newtonian physics is inadequate for ballistics. I am not sure that's true.
7. Page 36 - replace the 1st "the" with "that" - "but we could add yet another gear the moves the sheet of paper"
8. Page 38 - add the missing word "in" after the word "pain" - "reassembling it for every calculation was a pain the butt"
9. Page 42 - a word is missing before the question mark - "What logical statement do you know of that will result in ?"
10. Page 43 - the first row in the AND table is wrong - it should be zero.
11. Page 47 - I think at this stage of the book changing "C" to "carry" - in the diagram - would be good
12. Page 53 - it would be nice if the truth table order matched the function call order in the code above
13. Page 89 - use a capital "i" for isthmus - "crossing the isthmus of Panama"
14. Page 89 - I had to re-read the sentence on the discussion on railroads, so I suggest adding two dashes to enclose "through "Indian territory... Sierra Nevada".
15. Page 105 - remove the second "are" - "There are roughly are over 20 theorems"
16. Page 107 - Shannon's attribution to Tukey in the Wikipedia quote was just mentioned in the previous paragraph so it is probably unnecessary.
17. Page 110 - add a full stop before "Percentages" - "Percentages are just a simple way of thinking about a fraction between 0 and 1..."
18. Page 117 - "3.32" is missing in the following sentence - "The entropy of a message with a single number between 0 and 9 would be ,"
19. Page 117 - "entropy of 6.64 bits" is missing in the following sentence - "a message with two digits would have an ."
20. Page 118 - once the issue above is sorted it would be repeated in the next sentence. So, further changes would be required there.
21. Page 118 - remove the 1st "a" - "We'll talk about that more in a just a second."
22. Page 120 - "268,435,456" is missing from the following sentence - "We're interested in knowing the number of possibilities for the entire password, which is ."
23. Page 140 - should it be "named after" rather than "named for"? - "Huffman’s coding algorithm, named for the information theorist David Huffman"
24. Page 149 - add the word "is" after the word "this" - "Once again, this more of a historical “good to know” kind of thing."
25. Page 149 - replace "hopes" with "in the hope" - "Repeat the message in hopes the whole thing makes it across at some point"
26. Page 202 - remove the "s" from "Americans" - "The Americans teams were Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman"
27. Page 202 - remove the reference to "The Code Book" as it was already referenced above (page 195) - "if you want to know any more detail on this story, have a look at The Code Book by Simon Singh."
28. Page 207 - add a full stop after "Index of coincidence" - "...would enable an attack using a statistical procedure such as Friedman's Index of coincidence"
29. Page 242 - add the word "be" after the word "only" - "Thankfully the answer is simple: there must only one way to derive the factors for N"
30. Page 270 - add the word "it" after the word "convey" - "This number was huge, and I have no idea how to convey using English"
31. Page 281 - add the word "is" after the word "this" - "But this how you learn, after all."
32. Page 286 - add the character "s" after the word "look" - "It’s critical that this process look random"
33. Page 290 - change the word "to" to "so" - "...email text and frequency scanned to the service can optimize ads..."
34. Page 291 - change "here" to "hear" - "you’ll often here the following themes"
35. Page 317 - add the word "a" or "the" after the word "via" - "who can only communicate asynchronously via messenger."
36. Page 320 - add the word "but" after the word "person" - "This has led to speculation that Satoshi is not a real person, a group of people, or a time traveler."
37. Page 322 - replace the 2nd "the" with "then" - "If a node can demonstrate through some type of calculation that it is a loyal part of the system, the its contribution can be safely accepted."
38. Page 323 - add the word "point" after the word "last" - "That last is especially important"
39. Page 326 - replace the word "than" with the word "that" - "blockchain is a resilient, distributed transactional ledger than contains an entire history"
40. Page 335 - there is no start of the brackets - "I will anger the blockchain people with my oversimplifications)"
41. Page 335 - add the word "I" after the word "what" - "so I did what normally do"
42. Page 336 - replace the word "with" with "while" - "were your friends with growing up."
43. Page 337 - the following sentence implies the relationship between the dollar and gold really stopped after 2007 - "This means the value of the dollar is unhinged from the price of gold entirely...". However, that really happened much earlier, starting in 1971.
44. Page 341 - add a unit of time or distance - "I live about outside of Portland"
45. Page 345 - remove the second word "Steve" - "Steve Steve Beauregard"

Season 2 epub import in kindle, Font selector issue

I am trying to read the season 2 on an iPad and seems like font selector has some issue. I can only see urdu/arabic option in fonts

Missing Halting Problem section

On page 119 of the PDF the section on the Halting Problem seems to be missing.

The start of The Von Neumann Machine section implies that it has been covered, and the previous section ends with "In a wonderful bit of cheek, Turing provided the answer in the very same paper he used to introduce his machine." but then doesn't go on to say what it is.

Edit:
Reading further, it seems that this section has just been moved to later in the book. The bit at the start of the Von Neumann section probably needs to be updated to make this clearer.

Season 2 (Publisher’s version: 0.0.3 ) - PDF Page 18 .....rules by which God. Incomplete?

PDF Page 18 -- Second Sentence under figure2 George Boole -- Not Grammar, not spelling, incomplete thought?

He was (as you might suspect) an extremely religious man but was having trouble understanding the rules by which God.

….. by which God? did what? ...looks incomplete.

Modulus arithmetic clocks p226,227

A little pedantic or anal as you prefer but the clocks on p226,227 shouldn't actually have 12 on them doing mod 12 arithmetic it would be more correct to use 0 otherwise 12 mod 12 would be 12 which is certain to cause demons to fly out of the noses of any mathematically inclined readers.

PDF page 20 is missing equiv operator

From Twitter:
https://twitter.com/RosaCtrl/status/1100470198941954049/photo/1

Huffman coding

Hi Rob and Scott, I am glad to see your work on the imposter's handbook continue with this 2nd edition.

If you are going to explain compression, I kindly suggest that you also include a chapter on Huffman coding which is essential to understand how adaptive compressions like LZW work. And maybe you should start with Morse code which also attempts to reduce the amount of information when encoding text. And an excursion in the territory of entropy should probably be included too...

Error with Martin Hellman’s Breakthrough chapter?

Page 234 of the pdf
"For her secret key, a, Alice picks a 2. She plugs this value into Hellman’s equation along with the algorithm parameters, raising g (5) to the power of her secret key (2) and taking the modulus of n (9) to generate her public key, A"

Therefore, Alice's SECRET KEY is 2, and her PUBLIC KEY is 7.

Also, Bob's SECRET KEY is 4 and his PUBLIC KEY is also 4.

(...)

Page 235
"Alice sends Bob her 7 for her part of the key exchange, and Bob sends Alice his 4"
(...)
"Bob does the same with Alice’s number:"

On the equation that immediatly follows this sentence, Bob uses the number 2, which is Alice's SECRET KEY?!

How is it possible that Bob has Alice's secret key?

Determinism

On page 11, you equate determinism with the idea that everything has a cause. Technically speaking (in philosophy), determinism means something very different: that knowing the present state of the world will allow you to know what the next state will be. I would probably just remove the reference to determinism since I also don’t know how it’s related to Clarke’s three rules, but that’s just me.

I hope this is the right kind of technical note, but if it’s better to give as general feedback by email, I’m happy to switch to that. Thanks! 🙂

The truth table for Implication is wrong

What

Logic operation Implication

Where

Pages 24-25 of the 001 version, I guess (the PDF is titled Imposter2_001.pdf).

What did I expect

The truth table for the implication in page 25 should display

A	B	A->B
0	0	1
0	1	1
1	0	0
1	1	1

The result of the A -> B column is reversed.
The example on the wikipedia shows 1 0 1 1 because the columns are reversed, first the Ts and then the Fs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_table#Logical_implication

The explanation on page 24 is also reversed:

To that end, we know our expression is true when A and B are true, when they are false and when A is true and B is false.

That would be the other way around: when A then B and B is false, so it should be false.

That means we're dealing with OR that has a special trick that a regular OR can't do: return true when A and B are false *. The only way to do that is by negating A: ¬𝐴 ∨ 𝐵.

* And also return false when A is true.

I'd like to add a C# example of two's compliment addition and subtraction.