IVs

IVs is an acronym that can refer to several concepts depending on context, including medicine, cryptography, and gaming.

In medicine, an intravenous line, or IV, is a catheter placed into a vein to deliver fluids, medications, or nutrients directly into the bloodstream. IV administration enables rapid onset and precise dosing. A typical setup includes an IV catheter, a fluid bag or bottle, tubing, and a pump or gravity-fed infusion system. Safety relies on aseptic technique, proper site care, and monitoring for adverse reactions. Potential complications include infiltration, phlebitis, infection, and air embolism, though these can be minimized with proper technique.

In cryptography, an initialization vector, or IV, is a random or pseudorandom input used to initialize a cipher’s state at the start of encryption. The IV helps ensure that identical plaintext blocks produce different ciphertext. For many modes, the IV should be random and unique for each encryption with a given key; it is not required to be secret, but it must be unpredictable and conveyed with the ciphertext. The IV length typically matches the block size, such as 128 bits for AES.

In video games, particularly Pokémon, IVs or individual values are hidden numbers that influence a creature’s potential in each stat. Each stat has an IV, usually ranging from 0 to 31 in modern games, affecting the final stat totals at a given level. IVs are generated when a Pokémon is encountered or hatched and can be influenced through breeding in later generations, making them a focus of competitive tuning.