Here we continue with some of Tam’s internal thinking. Predicting stock-markets can be seen as similar to breaking codes. She doesn’t have to actually make any predictions (though she could), she can do her trades at random, and then realize the most successful trade for each second. This was the point when I realized she was actually pretty scary.

Imagine a gunman with a similar power who walks into a room with 20 targets and the gunman has 20 bullets. He could hit all the targets as fast as he could pull the trigger and not even have to open his eyes. This doesn’t mean that she is unbeatable, it’s just then in any roll of the dice she can always take the best conceivable roll, no matter how unlikely. Playing D&D and need to roll 20 5 times in a row? She would do it on the first try, if she is paying attention.

As for how she earned the initial $5, there are many sites on the internet where people can trade programming services. The typical format is that a person would put out a description of work in the shape of requirements and then people would put in bids for the cost to meet those requirements, often with a description how the product they would provide. This could be snippets, functions, sub-programs or whole program suites. Kind of like eBay for programming. I did a couple of those jobs and determined that the rates of pay were too low for me. After all anyone in the world can access these, and if you have a laptop in the middle of Africa then you might be willing to do programming work for a buck or two an hour, and still be the richest guy in the neighborhood. I couldn’t compete with that. Tam of course wouldn’t care as most programming tasks would be completely trivial for her.

This page, and the two after it, are largely to introduce us to Tam. Tam is all about perception and thinking, so I figured it was better to show some of her thinking. As I have been fleshing her out, so to speak, I have found that she is even more intimidating than I expected.

The thing about encryption may need some clarification. One theory of quantum computing holds that they might be very good at breaking codes. Most modern encryption attacks use one of two broad classes of attacks, either brute force or vulnerability. Vulnerabilities are stuff you hear about in the news, where a hacker uses a technical trick to make a code easier to break than it should be. Brute force is just trying password after password until the hacker gets the right one. Brute force attacks are why you shouldn’t pick simple passwords. With modern encryption it is supposed to take much much … MUCH longer to find the right password by randomly guessing then it does to encrypt data in the first place. However, with quantum computing it may work that multiple passwords are tried simultaneously.

This is what Tam is doing, when ever she is presented with a password barrier she tries ALL of the possible passwords at the same moment, but only the instance where she has randomly picked the right password is the world that ends up actually existing. It is not actually clear if this is something that is possible in the real world, but some current quantum theories seems to indicate it could be possible. If you want to read a really good piece of Science fiction that explores some of that you could check out Anathum by Neil Stephenson. Toward the end of the book a character who is in tune with the quantum copies of himself goes through a password protected door using exactly the method I just described where he selects a code at random, and then works to make the world where he picks the right code the ‘real’ world.

She went ahead and broke into all of the available Wi-Fi networks so that she could access the internet in parallel and get better bandwidth. I am fairly sure she can’t read all the pages simultaneously the way she guesses codes as when she was done she would have only read one, but she does read very very fast.