Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
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Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#2Hi HN, I recently solved the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge [0], and I wrote a blog post on how I reached the answer.
It's a moderately technical and (hopefully) entertaining run through of the process. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed doing the challenge (though, as you'll read, it was also quite a frustrating process). My github is on the post if you were interested in seeing a bit more in detail what my solution looked like, though I intend to write some follow up posts that are a bit more in the weeds of the solution. And frankly, the code I used is pretty ugly but it got the job done.
This is my first blog post, so if you have any feedback please let me know. All the writing, all the code was done by me, by hand, in vim.
[0] https://blog.janestreet.com/can-you-reverse-engineer-an-asic...
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#3[dead]
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#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. :)
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#5I wonder how far a LLM could get with this. It will be cool when we get to the point where you can decap a chip, take a picture, and then an LLM can create an emulator for that chip.
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#6> 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. :)
Google says "Jane Street has global office locations in New York, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Amsterdam, and Chicago" so if you're really at a loss where to spend your money, I would recommend searching for yacht dealerships in those cities. I'm sure it won't be a problem anymore.
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#7Hi HN, I recently solved the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge [0], and I wrote a blog post on how I reached the answer. It's a moderately technical and (hopefully) entertaining run through of the process. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed doing the challenge (though, as you'll read, it was also quite a frustrating process). My github is on the post if you were interested in seeing a bit more i…
Incredible amount of determination, but you really did make it hard for yourself!
You can install librelane to get the whole open silicon tool suite and the sky130 PDK. Circuit extraction can be done with magic. Going from a spice netlist to verilog netlist is pretty mechanical and not a hard transform to write. You almost immediately have something that can be simulated and a good baseline for further reversing.
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#8> 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.
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#9I wonder how far a LLM could get with this. It will be cool when we get to the point where you can decap a chip, take a picture, and then an LLM can create an emulator for that chip.
This would need good image recognition, but maybe not so far out of the realm of possibility.
These GDS design files have a lot more structure to them.
Re: Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge
#10curious 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 ..