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Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

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Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

#81

Post by chermi »

anon-3988 wrote: post #58
seritools wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, I did not learn that much from that experience. What did you expect?

I understand the sentiment, but in a world where these kinds of problems (And problems at work) that can trivially be solved by LLMs; what kind of value can I provide? That itself is a learning experience. What is even the point of technical interview questions or take home questions? This means that I am now open to hiring completely non-technical person, as long as they have a good personality and management skills…

"I understand the sentiment, but in a world where these kinds of problems (And problems at work) that can trivially be solved by LLMs; what kind of value can I provide?"

This is sad conclusion. Maybe you're more right than wrong, but my answer to the "value" question would be:

Solving even harder problems based on lessons from solving easier ones? Pretty similar to the trajectory in this blog post. Perhaps aided additionally by llms and other tools that can solve the subproblems so you can focus on the less obvious/automatable aspects of the problem?

But note the tension, only by being involved in the problem solving to some extent do you become better at it. So if your default is to say "An LLM can or will soon be able to solve it, why bother?", then your situation will become more desperate and your outlook more negative in a self-reinforcing way.

Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

#82

Post by karmakurtisaani »

vovavili wrote: post #17
bko wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of places claim they want to hire extremely smart autists, and some do. But these types of employees are incredibly hard to manage. Imagine herding cats. So if you don't invest a lot of effort in building an environment to let this person cook, go down the right rabbit holes and not rub others the wrong way, a person like this is a huge liability to the org.

A lot of companies who claim to want highly intelligent and autonomous engineers by revealed preference actually want glorified slightly above average ticket pushers. At least by the looks of it, Jane Street appears to be an odd one to genuinely value competence.

I can be a glorified slightly above average ticket pusher, where do I sign up for a million per year job?!

Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

#83

Post by __atx__ »

amelius wrote: post #18

If there's a "two stars" solution, then maybe there is also a "three stars" solution?

I checked and the solution is unique (at least within some reasonable bounds in terms of runtime etc, it's possible there is a 1000 bits long special solution hidden somewhere, but due to the relatively small amount of flops I doubt it).

Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

#84

Post by Andrew-Koper »

gyanchawdhary wrote: post #10

curious 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 ..

I read their posts and podcasts. They high frequency trade. They work in micro- and nano-seconds. I don't know what I'm talking about here, don't quote me, but a top guy said they 'process packets' the data is starting to be sent out while it's still arriving. Close to the wire/metal

Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

#87

Post by topham »

yuye wrote: post #47
anon-3988 wrote: post #14

I 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.

>I have used Codex (Sol 5.6 or whatever) to solve this problem. >Personally, I did not learn that much from that experience Fire is hot, water is wet, etc

If learning is the point then obviously that was a missed opportunity.

If success was the intent, then it's a win.

While challenges are fun, sometimes the requirement is simply to achieve the end goal, with no other point than that.

If your job is to stop terrorists, and that includes hacking into a system and extracting their plans, the "fun" of it isn't the point, only the end goal it's important. Sometimes when we do things like this for fun we forget that someone else out there absolutely needs to achieve the result and doesn't care how it's achieved.

It's the part of penetration testing some people miss. (It's not generally a fun job, almost everyone I know that did it got out as soon as possible. They weren't solving problems, they just running audit scripts and generating reports.)

Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

#89

Post by chamomeal »

darksaints wrote: post #67
ctippett wrote: post #46

> I ended up using a tool called ‘z3’. It’s kind of magical? Every time it finds a solution I get a surge of joy. This resonates so much. I had a similar feeling after going to my very first operations research lecture. Solving seemingly incomprehensibly complex problems by framing them as a bunch of simple constraints and getting a solution seemed like such magic.

Yeah this was my experience too. I have an undergrad business degree, but got nerd sniped by an optimization problem, found a solution with constraint programming, and ended up going down a 15 year operations research rabbit hole with it. Many people say that the way to tackle a hard problem is to break it down into smaller problems. I disagree. The best way to tackle a hard problem is to break it down into a defined…

Found minizinc/CP-SAT recently and I’m obsessed

Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

#90

Post by Hydraulix989 »

vovavili wrote: post #17
bko wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of places claim they want to hire extremely smart autists, and some do. But these types of employees are incredibly hard to manage. Imagine herding cats. So if you don't invest a lot of effort in building an environment to let this person cook, go down the right rabbit holes and not rub others the wrong way, a person like this is a huge liability to the org.

A lot of companies who claim to want highly intelligent and autonomous engineers by revealed preference actually want glorified slightly above average ticket pushers. At least by the looks of it, Jane Street appears to be an odd one to genuinely value competence.

> A lot of companies who claim to want highly intelligent and autonomous engineers by revealed preference actually want glorified slightly above average ticket pushers.

No. FAANG companies and quant firms want people who are independent and self-directed, not people who need to be told what to do.

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