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Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020

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Re: Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020

#61
post #60

256 bytes is in the "let's try every combination" range, I think. So, write a program that tries all of them and determines if any do something interesting enough to forward to a human for review.

Wouldn’t that be 256^256? That’s certainly a hell of a haystack

[deleted]

Re: Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020

#62
post #60

256 bytes is in the "let's try every combination" range, I think. So, write a program that tries all of them and determines if any do something interesting enough to forward to a human for review.

Wouldn’t that be 256^256? That’s certainly a hell of a haystack

It would be 8^256. Less than you guessed but still a 232-digit number...

Re: Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020

#63
post #60

256 bytes is in the "let's try every combination" range, I think. So, write a program that tries all of them and determines if any do something interesting enough to forward to a human for review.

Wouldn’t that be 256^256? That’s certainly a hell of a haystack

Unreasonably impossible as of yet, yes.

For handy reference:

8^8: 16,777,216

8^16: 281,474,976,710,656

8^32: 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336

8^64: 6,277,101,735,386,680,763,835,789,423,207,666,416,102,355,444,464,034,512,896

8^128: ...

8^256: ?

8^512: hello from the other side of the quantum dimension

8^8 sounds interesting. 16 million reboots of a real {PC,C64,ST,Amiga,Mac,Z80,...} sounds like a collectively highly entertaining kind of hilarious. The issues only begin when you start wondering if any of the programs wedges the hardware into "interesting" states that are preserved across reboots - or at least the what if of that dimension of entropy... then the problem space becomes 8^8^8...

[I decided to compute 8^8^8. The result is apparently 15 million digits long. (`echo 8^8^8 | bc -ql | wc` -> `222814 222814 15596963`)

Re: Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020

#64
post #62
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t that be 256^256? That’s certainly a hell of a haystack

It would be 8^256. Less than you guessed but still a 232-digit number...

I don’t understand how it’s that low. 256 bytes, each with 256 possible values. 256^256.

Re: Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020

#65
post #62
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t that be 256^256? That’s certainly a hell of a haystack

It would be 8^256. Less than you guessed but still a 232-digit number...

I'm sorry, are you saying here that a byte can only express 8 different values?

Re: Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020

#66
post #64
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be 8^256. Less than you guessed but still a 232-digit number...

I don’t understand how it’s that low. 256 bytes, each with 256 possible values. 256^256.

You're right, the other person is wrong :)

Re: Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020

#67
Here's a size comparison with a "hello world" program in my favorite language, Go.

  nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ cat > hello.go
  package main

  import "fmt"

  func main() {
      fmt.Println("hello world")
  }
  nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ go build
  nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ strip hello
  nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ ./hello 
  hello world
  nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ du -h
  1.4M .

Re: Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020

#68
post #55

Since these are so small I don't see why we couldn't have a "demoscene launcher" with a "mailto:" style protocol handler and just let people click on base64 encoded links to start the demo.

A handler for executing arbitrary code. What could possibly go wrong?

We already allow arbitrary code to execute by clicking a link, in the form of JavaScript.

You may argue that JS is sandboxed, but so is DOSBox. At least DOSBox can’t easily connect to remote servers over the internet.

Re: Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020

#69
post #63
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t that be 256^256? That’s certainly a hell of a haystack

Unreasonably impossible as of yet, yes. For handy reference: 8^8: 16,777,216 8^16: 281,474,976,710,656 8^32: 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336 8^64: 6,277,101,735,386,680,763,835,789,423,207,666,416,102,355,444,464,034,512,896 8^128: ... 8^256: ? 8^512: hello from the other side of the quantum dimension 8^8 sounds interesting. 16 million reboots of a real {PC,C64,ST,Amiga,Mac,Z80,...} sounds like a collectively…

Thats weird "reference". Why 8 as the base number? Nobody works with 3bit bytes. 8^8 == 2^24 == 2^(8 * 3) == 256^3, i.e. the combination space of three bytes.

The smallest category in pouet for reference is 32b (or 256 bits), so 2^256 combinations to brute force. For comparison usually 128bit encryption is considered "safe" and infeasible to brute force.

You might be able to constrain the search space to only valid IA32 instructions, but realistically I don't see it helping that much

Re: Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020

#70

256 bytes is in the "let's try every combination" range, I think. So, write a program that tries all of them and determines if any do something interesting enough to forward to a human for review.

AES is 256 bits and it's quite comfortably outside the "let's try every combination" range.
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