Talk:Gray Death (Deus Ex)

I wrote the following text but then realised it might be classified as original research, as this is my own observation and I haven't been able to find anyone else making the same point. I'm not hugely involved in Wikipedia editing so I'm not sure whether this is okay to put into the main article or not. Comments?


 * Interestingly, a possible connection between the Gray Death virus and the RSA encryption scheme (which relies on the fact that multiplying two large prime numbers is difficult to reverse, making the encryption hard to break) is made towards the end of the game:


 * "A cure? A cure!  Do you have any idea how easy it will be for me to make a new virus?  All I have to do is find a very large prime number and multiply." --Bob Page


 * While this is a vast oversimplification of the RSA algorithm, the analogy that this quote implies (between the breaking of an RSA-encrypted message and the creation of a vaccine for Page's virus) is an intriguing one.

--Crispy 06:01, 15 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Well, it is original research, of the kind that's hard to avoid when you're trying to explain parts of the game to outsiders. My latest edit to JC Denton probably has to be classified as original research too, but since the entire article is nothing but an interpretation of the game's content, it's hard to see how you classify things as "too original".


 * Now, to the part at hand. Does it belong as-is? Probably not. The writers were definitely thinking of integer factorization of a product of two very large primes (which is a core part of RSA, but not unique to RSA), but exactly how this is supposed to fit in is unclear. Apparently the virus is "encrypted" somehow, and to develop a cure the encryption has to be broken. What Bob Page is saying then is that the good guys (relatively speaking, of course) have cracked the encryption key of the Gray Death, but it's trivial for him to generate a new key for the same (or almost the same) viral template, rendering the existing cure useless. How exactly encryption is supposed to be involved in a nanotech virus is unclear, mostly because the workings of a nanotech virus are unclear. :-)


 * Some of this can probably be worked into the article without overstepping our license. Page's quote is not original research, and neither, I wager, is pointing out the connection to integer factorization. Anything beyond that is probably not up to us. 82.92.119.11 04:03, 28 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Good points. Maybe I'll try and work it in later. Crispy 02:33, 1 July 2006 (UTC)