[Cryptography] "Google teaches “AIs” to invent their own crypto and avoid eavesdropping"

[Jerry Leichter]

Summary:  Alice, Bob, and Eve are neural nets; Alice and Bob share a key.  Alice tries to send messages to Bob.  Bob is rewarded for correctly reading the messages; Eve is likewise rewarded for correctly intercepting them; Alice is rewarded when Eve fails (and Bob succeeds, I guess).

In the experiments reported, Alice and Bob turn out to be pretty good at fooling Eve, who proves to be a mediocre cryptanalyst.

And next we'll get bots posting their proposed algorithms to any crypto list that will have them.... :-)

Writeup at http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/google-ai-neural-network-cryptography/; paper at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.06918v1.pdf.  Reference to an XKCD I hadn't seen before in a comment:  https://xkcd.com/177/

                                                        -- Jerry