nice one
Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
31–40 of 100 posts
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#32curious what the actual use case for a challenge like this is from Jane Streets side .. guess the obvious one is trading even closer to the wire .. being able to reverse engineer .. inspect circuits to uncover flaws or optimisations that shave latency or improve determinism in the trading stack .. but I wonder if there are other less obvious applications ..
Probably this is just an unfamiliar domain for most non-hardware folks, so it's a nice challenge that might introduce Jane Street to some people they might want to interview for non-hardware roles.
But, they do have a hardware division, and Jane Street has a podcast that talks about some of the things they do https://signalsandthreads.com/?tag=hardware
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#33To help with such tasks for real chips (given the good quality images) there is Degate[1][2] open source software. [1] https://www.degate.org/ [2] https://github.com/DegateCommunity/Degate
Degate is even a bit overkill, it is meant for when you only have images of the physical chip. This challenge has the full GDS files, which are the files that are sent to the fab for manufacturing. They still contain information about all of the separate layers. In this case they even contained the stdcell names, making even full transistor and logic function extraction unnecessary.
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#34I have used Codex (Sol 5.6 or whatever) to solve this problem. It turns the problem into Z3, then iteratively work through the problems until it figured out the solution. Personally, I did not learn that much from that experience. So I am glad that there's other people working on it as well. I am mostly interested in the techniques used to solve this.
The fact that agents can solve these is telling and the Infosec Capture The Flag community is trying to figure out how to approach.
I recently solved a (in)famously hard challenge (disobey conference hacker ticket) more or less by accident. I say by accident because I have always ignored this challenges as they generally require a lot of patience and motivation to solve. Some years they haven't been solved at all. This year I had a GPT sub with some unused quota so I thought let's see how far it gets.
And it crunched through the whole thing in an evening and morning (occasional poking from me to keep going and steer it right).
Like anon, I learned nothing except that the agents have become really good at solving puzzles. Last time I had thrown a puzzle on them was Advent of code, with GPT3 I think and it struggled so much I gave up my experiment on day 7 or something.
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#35So good
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#36curious what the actual use case for a challenge like this is from Jane Streets side .. guess the obvious one is trading even closer to the wire .. being able to reverse engineer .. inspect circuits to uncover flaws or optimisations that shave latency or improve determinism in the trading stack .. but I wonder if there are other less obvious applications ..
Probably this is just an unfamiliar domain for most non-hardware folks, so it's a nice challenge that might introduce Jane Street to some people they might want to interview for non-hardware roles. But, they do have a hardware division, and Jane Street has a podcast that talks about some of the things they do https://signalsandthreads.com/?tag=hardware
wow thanks for sharing, will check it out
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#37I'm not sure I've ever seen such a vicious case of NIH-syndrome. Regardless, congrats on the solve!
I first thought you were teasing Jane Street instead of OP. Maybe shows that OP is a good culture fit for Jane Street :)
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#38I'm not sure I've ever seen such a vicious case of NIH-syndrome. Regardless, congrats on the solve!
Since this was for fun, and the goal was learning at least as much as solving the problem that is just fine. More people should get NIH for those purposes.
Now if he is presenting his tools as a good way to solve this problem, something you should use, or any such - that would be a bad thing. Good tools for this are complex and need to be done as part of a large team. If good tools that others should use is the goal then he should join some other group making those tools. I'm sure there is an existing open source project (maybe KiCAD - I'm not in this space so that is the only name I can come up with but maybe their goals are different?) that does this and would welcome more help.
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#39So cool to see someone who loves challenges. Congrats!
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#40Hi Chris,
just for info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDSII will tell you about the GDS format. It apparently stands for Graphic Data System II (originally developed by Calma in the late 1970s).