Video: How to stop an evil postman

Starting from a cute puzzle and building up to Diffie–Hellman key exchange. With Amit Sahai.

This video started when Amit Sahai reached out to Vašek Rozhoň about a potential collaboration - the proposed topic was Amit's. I knew of Amit through this WIRED video, and as someone who's also into science popularization, I appreciate the clarity of his explanations!

In each Polylog video we experiment a bit with a new format, technique or technology, and in this case it was interviewing someone and then finding clips from the interview to use in the video, which is otherwise unscripted. We also had Richard's sister Romana doing the editing this time.

Three weeks after publishing, the video is not getting much traction - we were disappointed to see that because it follows a similar format to last year's successful zero-knowledge proofs video: it's cryptography, starts with a riddle and then goes on to more general and applicable topics.

The explanation is probably that the ZKP premise is easier to summarize ("I can prove I've solved this Sudoku without revealing it") and it's more surprising that the riddle is solvable. To me it's confirmation that people don't care that much about how useful and applicable the topic is, but care more about seeing cool math/algorithms. This is a long-standing internal debate at Polylog: there are also examples like the A* video that would suggest that applicability does matter. Ah, the mysteries of the algorithm...