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Re:Corn Wars by stephengillie on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @06:21PM (#10082603)
You make these inbred parent seeds sound like private keys in encryption. You jealously guard them, you combine them to create offspring (public keys) which you freely distribute without worry, and lots of people are trying some arcane process to deduce your exact secret.
Re:Corn Wars by scarmig on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @07:10PM (#10082805)
Musing:

Hmm, so let's play with Diffie-Hellplant. So you have two inbred genomes as two secrets, persisted as individual organisms. Alice and Bob negotiate on a public inbred genome that they pull from some kind of seed store (being careful to never re-use one they've used before!). Alice and Bob both create their own crossbreeds deterministically, from the secret organism and the public one. It's hard to get the private genomes from the two crosses, so they can send the seeds in the mail to each other.

After that, I'm not sure you can get two shared secret clones from the crossbreeds and the opposite private inbreeds. (ETA: Pretty positive you can't, though if anyone has any ideas along these lines, I'm eager to hear!)

Sounds like the start of some cypher-biopunk novel, though.

Re:Corn Wars by gknoy on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @07:29PM (#10082861)
Until this moment, I had not realized I would find such a book interesting.
Re:Corn Wars by scarmig on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @08:07PM (#10082972)
If you're interested in sci-fi where biotech trumps cybertech, The Windup Girl is a great read.

Relevant to the article, too. It's set in a post-carbon dystopian Bangkok, where giant agribusiness monopolies dominate the world through control of the food supply, including offensive bioengineering to create mutant plagues that destroy native crops and introduce dependency. The main character is an agent of one of these agricorps, whose mission is espionage against Thailand's central seedbank.

Re:Corn Wars by DanBC on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @08:25PM (#10083032)
Also "Calorie Man". Seemingly available here: http://www.nightshadebooks.com/Downloads/WindupStories.pdf
Re:Corn Wars by ethbro on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @09:27PM (#10083241)
"Calorie Man" reminded me a lot of "New Rose Hotel" by Gibson. Funny how the same story filters through different lenses as the years tick past.
Re:Corn Wars by btown on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @06:49PM (#10082722)
I think you mean public keys in the second sentence, but if so, that sounds like a very apt analogy.
Re:Corn Wars by stephengillie on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @07:16PM (#10082828)
Yes I did, and thank you.
Re:Corn Wars by thaumasiotes on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @08:16PM (#10083007)
But in this case, deducing the exact secret is trivially easy; everyone knows how to do it.
Re:Corn Wars by stephengillie on Tuesday August 18, 2015 @08:18PM (#10083014)
Yes, which is why we're discussing Chinese people digging corn seeds out of American farms.