Meeting notice: The 01.03.06 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested Topic: For at least the last 15 years this community has argued over whether NT favors offense or defense, or, more generally, whether the voyage to the nanoscale will stimulate a breakaway advantage of one or the other. Offense (by definition) is the side that enjoys the advantage of surprise. Defense draws differentially on better lines of supply and communications, clearer targets, and a more intimate grasp of the local terrain. It seems to follow that better sensing technologies work to the advantage of defense (since sensing defeats surprise), while improvements in communication, transportation, and penetrating power add more to offense (on a net basis; obviously defense can make use of them as well). You could infer from this scheme that technological change is biased in favor of defense, since it ought to be easier to improve one function than several. On the other hand, it is often mysterious how to improve sensing in ways that are relevant -- sensing is just another word for intelligence, and there is no Moore's Law for smarts -- wheras society has a steady flow of opportunities for improving the offense-enabling technologies, both because there are more of them and because improvements in transport, etc., seem to be easier to develop and implement. So perhaps technological change inherently benefits the offense. A contemporary example is the war between cryptography and cryptoanalysis. In this struggle cryptographers represent the offensive; they get to pick the 'where and when'; defense (often quite literally) is represented by the analysts. There is a consensus in the community that each advance in hardware contributes more to the offense (as defined here), and that cryptoanalysts get much smarter, which is always possible, they have fallen hopelessly far behind. Another example is NWD -- nuclear weapons defense. The general (though far from universal) consensus of the technical community is that at present NWD is fatally handicapped in requiring a very high degree of systems integration. Continental defense systems are enormously complicated, DOD software development is a swamp, and there are a large number of counters that need to be anticipated and dealt with. A huge testing program is necessary to get any kind of reasonable kill odds, and DOD's enthusiasm for testing is tempered (as is demonstrated by the weird performance of the SLAM missiles in the latest attack on Iraq radars and the ongoing scandal about the Osprey tests). On the other hand, perhaps someday some advance in simulation technology will so lower the cost of building a sufficiently smart system that the project will become irresistible. If you believe that a life is worth a million dollars, that an intercepted warhead would save a million lives, that the odds of a launch requiring interception over the design cycle of the system is one in a hundred, and that the odds of a successful interception is .5 (obviously a very high degree of assurance), then the logical price point for an interesting NWD system would be $5 billion. Some way to go, but maybe NT will get us there. If it does, presumably many countries, and perhaps even some large corporations, might want to build their own NWDs. Perhaps someday this will be a high school rocket club project. In short, defense is constrained by software and offense, by hardware. Since hardware improves, offense enjoys a widening, and possibly unrecoverable, edge in every field defined by a offense/defense struggle. It is easy to see the implications of this on the military aspects of international affairs: a spreading reliance, for better or worse, on MAD. The larger question is to what degree this dynamic characterizes other spheres of the culture. Is offense winning in the realm of business strategy? In marketing? In sports? <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.