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Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

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Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

#41
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.

There are a lot of incredibly smart non-autists. Or maybe slightly autistic, but enough awareness of the real world that they can be managed.

Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

#42
post #8
post #4

> Well I don’t really know what to work on next Let me help you: work on figuring out how to spend the millions of dollars every year Jane Street will pay you to clock in. I've heard private aviation is expensive, for example. :)

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.

Please, explain how you determined this person was an "extremely smart autist".

Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

#43
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are a lot of incredibly smart non-autists. Or maybe slightly autistic, but enough awareness of the real world that they can be managed.

The strong affinity between autism and intelligence seems strongest in technical fields, and engineering and computer science in particular. Autism does not seem to be over-represented to anywhere near the same degree in many other domains that are full of intelligent people.

Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

#44

Hi 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).

No spoilers! But thanks I did find out after I published, I just thought it was funnier not to know while I was working on it

Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

#45
post #42
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.

Please, explain how you determined this person was an "extremely smart autist".

I took it as a compliment!

Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

#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.

Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge

#47

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

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