Belgian programmer solves MIT’s 20-year-old time capsule cryptographic puzzle

https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/belgian-programmer-solves-mits-20-year-old-cryptographic-puzzle

by MrXOR • 7 years ago

698 118 7 years ago

csail.mit.edu

That'd be me (fellow HNer and belgian programmer)... Very happy to see this upvoted up to HN's frontpage! Any question welcome but I cannot post the solution until the time-capsule opening ceremony on the 15th of May : )

EDIT: WIRED article just in. Haven't read it yet. Link if anyone is interested: https://www.wired.com/story/a-programmer-solved-a-20-year-ol...

EDIT2: forgot to tell but the mining pool Antpool posted a message in the block header / coinbase data of Bitcoin's block 573138 saying "Congrats Bernard Fabrot for solving LCS35!". My brother tried to time this with the press release which was supposed to come out on friday but then the press release got pushed back to today/monday. So yeah, coinbase data of block 573 138 is kinda very cool (it requires cooperation of a mining pool because it's not just in a transaction but in a block). TYVM to the everybody at Antpool! Big thanks for that : )

atdt• 7 years ago

This is very cool. Congratulations!

How did you beat Peffers' team? Did you simply start the computation sooner, or did you reach some insight that eluded them?

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

No Simon Peffers' team did something more impressive: they're using a FPGA. I simply started way earlier using consumer-grade hardware (a Core i7-6700 CPU).

primaryobjects• 7 years ago

Congratulations! I’m curious if a quantum algorithm could help with this, as the problem deals with factoring large numbers?

zaat3• 7 years ago

Bernard Fabrot spent the last three and a half years computing the solution to a puzzle

TacticalCoder last HN comment is from Dec 5, 2015. Checks out.

Kudos to you, well done!

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

I actually thought this might get posted to HN, so I went through a lot of pain to find back a way to get my HN login back (basically had no access to the email with which I opened an account here: I had to dive deep down in some Google Suite tied to a domain name to find a way into the user account and eventually reset my HN password). I'm glad I did in time and didn't miss this thread!

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

TacticalCoder last HN comment is from Dec 5, 2015. Checks out.

I didn't realize... Your comment is actually extremely funny: I love it : )

Yeah, it's more or less when I started computing that. This is hilarious.

pryce• 7 years ago

I see this problem as simultaneously a cryptographic challenge and a DevOps one.

So mine isn't a cryptographic question, but I'd love to know what steps you took to ensure integrity and uptime of your consumer i7 hardware, and capture of each partial step of the solution, while you ran your algorithm.

EDIT: also, congratulations! (How did I leave that out!?)

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

I'm no cryptographer so it's good news you don't have any cryptographic question ; )

I basically used my everyday workstation. There were 79 trillions operations to be made and I'd save the intermediate result every 1 billion result (so approximately every 22 minutes I'd save a result).

The computation cannot be parallelized and the i7 I was using has four cores. So basically instead of turning it every night off I'd simply leave it running 24/7.

I'd simply backup the files with the intermediate results once in a while. I rebooted the computer about 50 times in 4 years and during those 4 years during about 3 and half years it was computing towards the solution.

But I coded (totally unrelated things), compiled things from source, browsed the web, did my email, etc. from the very workstation which computed the solution.

The computation is easy to relaunch from any intermediate step.

Thanks for the congrats!

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

As for the uptime it's a pretty reliable machine: I'm running the i7-6700 (non K, so non overclocked) version. Intel lists it at 65W max TDP but that'd be with all the cores at 100% I guess. It's a 3.4 Ghz CPU turbo-boosting when only one core is at 100% to 4.0 Ghz on that one core.

OS is Debian stretch: it's rock solid in my experience.

It was rebooted on average once a month (I switched country, there were black outs, I upgraded the OS, etc.) but there have been stretches where it was up for several months in a row, happily cranking!

HenryBemis• 7 years ago

Congratulations!! This may cost me some karma bit it is definitely worth guessing!!

Is the answer.... 42? :)

In all seriousness, I hope that on May 16th you will post your efforts/solutions/other miscellanea somewhere, and will come back to HN and make a "Show" post for us all to admire and celebrate with you.

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

Celebration at the MIT on the 15th of May and it is public.

I don't have a blog (yet) but I do have a few things I'd like to write about (not just this puzzle) and share with other enthusiasts so I think I'll simply start a blog. But it won't be on the 16th: I'll need some time to come back home etc.

MrXOR5• 7 years ago

What was the question?

karim• 7 years ago

Whoa, are you the Bernard Fabrot that wrote intro to Linux books in the late '90s early '00s (https://www.amazon.com/Bernard-Fabrot/e/B004N6XBQC/ref=ntt_d...)? If yes, I have to say thank you very much — I owe you my career!

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

That'd be me too!

I'd love to hear more about it: you can email me bernard @ fabrot dot com

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

And fun fact: that (french) book was actually typeset in LaTeX but I had to fight big times with my published/editor so that they'd accept LaTeX as they wanted me to typeset it using QuarkXPress. I knew how to use Quark XPress but I wanted that book to be typeset from Linux, with LaTeX. And eventually they accepted ^ ^

rmbryan• 7 years ago

What are your thoughts on projecteuler.com?

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

I obviously love all the kind of algorithmic puzzle / challenges / competition.

I haven't done many from Project Euler but I did participate a lot in the "TopCoder" competition back when TopCoder started (that'd be many many years ago).

I think it's a great way to learn about algorithms or to learn a new programming language.

amildie• 7 years ago

Nice work man

epstein_guy• 7 years ago

There is also a thread on reddit's r/technology https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/bitha2/belgian_...

MrXOR5• 7 years ago

Hi @TacticalCoder, One question!?

From Rivest-Shamir-Wagner's paper[1]:

“Solving the puzzle should be like having a baby: two women can’t have a baby in 4.5 months."

[1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RSW96.pdf

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

Hi MrXOR,

first thanks a lot for posting this to HN!

Then: is there a question somewhere in your post which I missed? : )

sneak• 7 years ago

What was the ascii sentence result and what were the factorization instructions (presumably just a large prime factor of the result)?

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

It was decided that the solution would be kept secret until the 15th of May, when the time-capsule shall be opened.

As the problem states: there's a number allowing to factorize n. There's also a little message.

lkloosterman• 7 years ago

Hey, I know it's kind of off-topic, but I couldn't help noticing your OS. Are you using awesomewm/what's your setup! Also, what monitor is that?

dedosk• 7 years ago

+1 for what monitor is that?

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

Hi, no problem for me with the off-topicness: I said I'd gladly answer questions : )

As dsincl12 wrote it's indeed a 38": the LG 38UC99-W.

And you're correct, good catch: it's the Awesome WM running on Linux (Debian Stretch). For the geeky details: it's Awesome WM but with a patch I modified doing "useless but not useless" gaps. Basically it adds gaps between the top bar and between the windows, but it doesn't add gaps on the edge of the screen (which to me makes the more sense but YMMV).

So yeah a Core-i7 6700 / 16 GB of RAM / NVMe M.2 PCI-e 3.0 x4 SSD, which is my daily workstation (as I wrote elsewhere in this thread: I solved this on my everyday workstation).

I've got 12 virtual workspaces set up and my "main" one is in a three columns layout (with Emacs in the middle ;)

vasili111• 7 years ago

Congratulations! Any ideas for the next challenge?

happy-go-lucky• 7 years ago

computed the solution using the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library (GMP).

Great job. Kudos.

docbrown• 7 years ago

Although Rivest initially released the puzzle’s code in Java, Fabrot realized it could be solved faster if he used the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library, free software written in C for doing “precise arithmetic.” So Fabrot dedicated one of the CPU cores on his home desktop computer to running squaring operations in an attempt to solve the puzzle. He says his computer was running the operation 24/7, except when he would have to leave on vacation or there was a power outage.

It seems as if your 2014 comment hinted at this project. Applause for keeping this tight lipped for those years.

2014 comment: >Java is quite fast compared to most languages but for some things it is still terribly slow compared to C / C++. I had to do some big integers crunching lately and tried: Java, Go, Go with GMP, C (GMP) and Haskell (using GMP under the hood). Eventually I went for good old C with the latest GMP version for it was the fastest for my use case (with Haskell and Go with GMP coming close but still not as fast as C). Java was, for the computation I needed to do... Eight times slower than C! I know I was hitting a edge case for a very specific kind of computation but still. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7979006

rich-tea2• 7 years ago

Just want to add that GMP is not "C". The critical parts are written in assembly. It's not really possible to do fast multiple-precision arithmetic in C. You need direct access to add with carry instructions and the like.

cjslep• 7 years ago

Congratulations!

Insanity2• 7 years ago

Fellow HNer and fellow Belgian here. Congratulations! If you're ever around Leuven I'd love to buy you a beer and have a chat ;-)

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

Quite a few of us in here! I spend a lot of time in other countries so I'm not that often in Belgium but I'll make sure to contact you when I come around. We should exchange emails. You can email me at bernard at fabrot dot com !

leaveyou• 7 years ago

Hey, congrats ! I like your display shown in the Wired article.. it looks very ergonomic ! Could you tell me what brand/model it is ? Thanks :-)

EDIT: got it, it's LG 38UC99-W.. thanks

adriansky• 7 years ago

Thanks, I was looking for the display specs as well :)

spuz• 7 years ago

Hi Bernard. Can you shed some light on why Rivest's prediction that this puzzle would take 35 years of computation was so wildly off? In the paper he predicts that clock speeds would reach 10Ghz by 2012, he also predicts another 5 fold speed improvement by 2034. I am not sure what the actual technological improvements have been since 1999 but it seems our processors are way below his predictions of where we would be in 2012, let alone 2034. He states:

"We estimate that the puzzle will require 35 years of continuous computation to solve, with the computer being replaced every year by the next fastest model available. Most of the work will really be done in the last few years, however."

So how were you able to perform a calculation that should take 35 years in just 4? Where did Rivest get his assumptions wrong?

CodeArtisan• 7 years ago

You still need the same amount of iterations (79 685 186 856 218)[1] to resolve the problem but it's now faster because

SIMD instructions[2] lowered the amount of cpu cycles needed per operation.

Novel algorithms[3] lowered the amount of operations needed per iteration.

[1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/lcs35-puzzle-description... (short description at the bottom).

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMD

[3] https://gmplib.org/manual/Algorithms.html

stunt• 7 years ago

Congratulations!

sspencer• 7 years ago

It completely makes my day that the solver is on HN.

Maven911• 7 years ago

How much work was involved in the 3.5 years ? What tips would you say worked for you ? What do you think you do in your life that might have given you a leg up in cracking the puzzle ? (besides being intellectually inclined and adept)

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

How much work was involved in the 3.5 years ?

Already answered somewhere but lost in this thread...

Hardly anything. Relaunching the computation after a black out or an OS reinstall or when I moved from one country to another : )

Also once in a while going ballistic with backups as to not lose x months / years of computations.

Then at the end doing as the puzzle says to do: xor to get the secret message. Get b from the secret message and do 5^b mod (2^1024) then find the first prime above the resulting number. Divide n by that first prime to get the second prime. This took no time.

What do you think you do in your life that might have given you a leg up in cracking the puzzle ?

I don't know. It required finding it (mostly chance there), reading it and understanding how the parameters were set up, realizing that a solution could probably be found in some "reasonable" amount of time and then it required some dedication (and maybe a tiny of crazyness too) to run if for so long.

I clearly always liked optimization and learning new languages and trying libraries and whatnots: so as the solver was simple to implement I was easy to quickly try different languages / libraries. I kinda knew upon reading the puzzle that there was a good chance that it could be solved faster than expected.

But really it's like 10 or 12 lines of code. I spent some time doing performance tests but besides that it was just being patient?

I was clearly motivated by the idea that I could be the first one to find the solution to this puzzle. That one carrot worked wonderfully on me : )

perryprog• 7 years ago

Hi, and belated congratulations!

Are you by any chance planning to release your source after the ceremony? It'd be really interesting to read some peak-efficiency GMP code as that's a library I've always been interested in.

Additionally, do you happen to know how much longer it could take to factor modulus n and then compute the value for 2^(2^t) using the methods described in the paper? i.e. instead of repeated squaring compute

  2^(2^t mod phi(n)) mod n

yoha• 7 years ago

Well played! If only I had made my attempt earlier!

    2019-03-18T20:23:06+01:00
    AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 B50 Processor
    56.674783% (0x2912f5a00000 / 0x48792741a51a) ETA: 1 year 138 days (2020-09-18)

Supranational4• 7 years ago

Hey All! Cryptophage team here (https://www.cryptophage.com). Feel free to ask any questions about our alternative approach to solving the puzzle that Bernard just cracked!

coverband• 7 years ago

Hi there. Can you share some pointers to the alternate algorithm that was mentioned?

Thanks and congrats to you as well for reducing the calculation time!

Supranational4• 7 years ago

The goal was to extract as much parallelism from a single squaring operation as possible using the available hardware resources. We used a Xilinx FPGA. There will be a paper detailing the exact algorithm in the coming weeks. In the interim, if you are interested in digging into code, you can find some of the primitives for the design here: https://github.com/supranational/primitives

MrXOR5• 7 years ago

Congratulations!

One questions: Solving this puzzle has any impact on Verifiable Delay Functions security (specially Chia's VDF[1])?

[1] https://github.com/Chia-Network/vdf-competition

Thanks

Supranational4• 7 years ago

Hey MrXOR! First off, thanks for posting this link to HN! Second, the VDF used here leverages RSA groups, while the Chia implementation uses Class groups. These two VDFs are compared here: https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/VDFsurvey.pdf. Both the VDFs are subject to hardware and algorithmic speedups which will not impact the security of their use as long as these are taken into account. If you are interested in learning more about VDFs I would recommend looking at this collaborative project by Ethereum and Filecoin: https://vdfresearch.org/.

dzdt• 7 years ago

Given that processor technology has underperformed Moore's law since 1999, I'm surprised that Rivest underestimated the time needed to complete the challenge. I wonder how that happened.

aasasd• 7 years ago

From my completely noob understanding, the implementation of this particular operation of squaring has managed to outrun the law.

jey• 7 years ago

Wait a minute, did the solution method amount to "do the straightforward thing using libgmp and then run it for 3 years straight?"

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

Precisely. And I did this on my everyday workstation, which I also used simultaneously for coding, browsing, emailing, etc.

Is that not epic? : )

Now I think it's fair to say that part of the solution also consisted in realizing that using a fast big integer library it was doable in three years something.

pure-awesome• 7 years ago

Since you were backing up the partial results, I assume this means you could load such a backup and continue from it if something happened to the running machine.

Does that mean that you could, if you wished, have switched to a different machine and just continued where you left off? E.g., could the Peffers team, if they knew about it, theoretically have taken your partial results and run them on their FPGA to obtain the final result a little bit faster than if would have been otherwise?

(Not suggesting this is in any way what you should have done. Just curious)

logotype• 7 years ago

Wow, congrats! My computer has for the last 16 YEARS been trying to break RC5-72: http://stats.distributed.net/participant/phistory.php?projec...

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

Ah "Ron's Code 5". It's Ron Rivest too ofc!

Good you post this because I had no idea what I could keep my computer busy with now that LCS35 is solved ; )

warp_factor• 7 years ago

That's why I love HackerNews, you can meet those type of interesting personalities and ask them questions right here!

Can you tell us a bit more about your self-taught background? What do you do for a living? How did you hear about the challenge?

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

I found the challenge by chance. It was so long ago I don't exactly remember when. Thought it was 2015 but an old comment of mine on HN seems to indicate I may have started looking into this back in 2014, when I was still using a core-i5 CPU : )

Can you tell us a bit more about your self-taught background?

Sure... I started programming in BASIC at 11 years old on the most inconceivable setup ever: an Atari 2600, which was a gaming console (the infamous one which lead to the video industry crash of 1983 with a landfill filled with E.T. cartdridges). So how do you write BASIC on that at 11 years old? Well your mom offers you a "BASIC cartridge" which comes with a keyboard in two parts you plug in the joystick ports! (horrible experience but I do remember writing tiny programs drawing colored lines using that).

Then the Commodore C-64: more BASIC, some assembly using a "power cartrigde", mainly to modify (hack?) games. Then the Commodore Amiga: learning to write intros and demos. Then the PC (386, 486, and so on): writing a video game (finished but never published but it landed me my first job: long way too long story), writing more intros and demos (won a PC demo compo in Sweden). I'll blog one day (when I'll have a blog) about that PC / DOS video game which was running at 60 Hz on a 386 because it used a cool collision detection method I came up with (which as far as I know is unique and was pixel perfect even back then and was and still is particularly efficient). I still do have both the source and the binary for that game.

For the languages I mainly did BASIC then assembly (680x0 and 80x86), C with inline assembly, C++, Java... Then I stuck with Java for a very long time. Got a Sun Certified Java Programmer certification around 2000 (which makes me an oldtimer): only cert I ever got.

I cannot say I didn't do boring Java consultancy for even more boring companies/organizations. And thankfully once in a while a fun professional project ; )

Nowadays I'm still programming in Java as for my own projects I like to write proof of concepts using Clojure (and ClojureScript). And as I'm an Emacs (IntelliJ for Java though) user if of course waste a lot of time with elisp, hacking my Emacs config!

I hope you still love HN ; )

fbn792• 7 years ago

Looks like Massdrop addicted (keyb, mat, sad, maybe the whatch and monitor too?)

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

Ah no, I don't use Massdrop.

Keyboard is a Happy Hacking Keyboard Pro JP. Mat was a gift from my brother and I have no idea where it comes from. Monitor is a LG. Watch is a slightly fancy swiss mechanical diver's watch ; )

fbn792• 7 years ago

AhAhAh. However cool desktop! :)

cultureswitch• 7 years ago

Aaah, living the Topre Life I see? Great to see these babies outside of the mech keyboard subreddit.

hannob• 7 years ago

I just tried to dig into the background of this, the original description is here:

https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/lcs35-puzzle-description...

I have a question and maybe someone can answer it: This indicates that knowledge of the factorization of the modulus n allows to do this calculation faster, which is likely how the designers of this puzzle calculated the result.

However it's not explained how that happens and how the factors of n help. I assume this may be someone related to RSA, as there you also are able to do something much faster if you know the factors of a combined modulus. However in RSA you're able to invert a modular exponentiation. Here you seem to be able to speedup many successive exponentiations.

Is there some clever way to translate these two problems into each other and thus use an RSA-like method?

(Update: I found this paper https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RSW96.pdf which explains how to do the calculation on page 4, but is still lacking an explanation why. But I guess for people fluent in number theory it's probably somehow obvious.)

acqq3• 7 years ago

I guess for people fluent in number theory it's probably somehow obvious

It's "obvious" to the people who are aware of how RSA works, and know that Rivest based his derivation of the puzzle on the properties on which RSA encryption also depends.

Note, Rivest is one of Rivest–Shamir–Adleman: "The acronym RSA is made of the initial letters of the surnames of Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, who first publicly described the algorithm in 1978."

In shortest and simplest, the "hardest" part is just that the numbers which have to be processed are huge and that nobody knows an algorithm which would avoid doing a lot of the calculations to factor such huge numbers. Then for Rivest as he created the "puzzle" the goal was just how to construct one special huge number which encrypts the message. Constructing all that is then by a clever design faster than solving. Those who try to solve the puzzle don't have the exact construction numbers Rives used, just the result which has to be attacked by "brute force" calculations. The intermediate results during that process aren't predictable faster than simply calculating them, but every next depends on the previous one.

But not everything related to RSA is mathematically rigorously proved, as you can see in the Wikipedia article.

fortenforge• 7 years ago

It seems like no one has answered your question so I'll give it my best shot.

We want to find the value of 2^(2^t) mod n where n = pq. It's a well known number-theoretic fact that 2^phi(n) mod n = 1, where phi is the Euler totient function (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_totient_function).

This theorem is called Euler's theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_theorem). For n = pq, phi(n) = (p-1)(q-1)

So if 2^phi(n) = 1, then 2^(2 * phi(n)) = 1 and 2^(3 * phi(n)) = 1 and so on, so we really only need to know the value of 2^t mod phi(n). We can compute this value in O(log(t)) operations via repeated squaring, and once we know this value (let's call it k), then we just need to compute 2^k mod n to finish, which again, can be done quickly using repeated squaring.

Here's a quick demo in python:

  $ python
  >>> p = 8721676787107355947610787701585837629266743108012786178142468507932506290346645194233003705268505408163930982434418938387386290453411395078603729114734341
  >>> q = 8903989072246145056499086678843460912573461209473391355874543630090691433843393509873230695095738299681258115825746186699033768361727241007153178256782969
  >>> n = p * q
  >>> phi = (p - 1)*(q - 1)
  >>> t = 1000
  >>> x = 2
  >>> for _ in range(t):
  ...     x = (x*x) % n
  ... 
  >>> x
  71836162857086924742436011377120654460634075903529962708552402169419490230741381078707287421912274480993140536800209014695404113617083557073377609336198536584108952782855884250603887258689220754542881131492565231964253742236040236745851352559544932355488898852071685626631281275266638607487563485757328752568L
  >>> k = pow(2, t, phi)
  >>> y = pow(2, k, n)
  >>> y
  71836162857086924742436011377120654460634075903529962708552402169419490230741381078707287421912274480993140536800209014695404113617083557073377609336198536584108952782855884250603887258689220754542881131492565231964253742236040236745851352559544932355488898852071685626631281275266638607487563485757328752568L
  >>> x == y
  True
  >>>

The key here (as in the RSA cryptosystem) is that we have no way of computing phi(n) without knowing the factorization of n.

audiometry• 7 years ago

"Based on Moore’s law and how long it took to run the squaring operation in 1999, Rivest estimated that computing the answer to the puzzle should take approximately 35 years."

So how did Rivest create the puzzle back then in the first place, without taking 35 years to generate it?

Sahhaese• 7 years ago

The asymmetry of three things is essentially what secures of a lot of cryptography:

  1. multiplying two large prime numbers together (easy)
  2. Factoring the result without knowledge of those primes (extremely difficult)
  3. Factoring the result with knowledge of one of the primes (easy)

Those properties are essentially what make up the foundation of a lot of public key crypto.

For this puzzle, knowing the factorisation of n allowed a shortcut to quickly generate the puzzle, but without that factorisation it required squaring numbers 79,685,186,856,218 times sequentially so parallelism isn't a help.

The actual code to generate the puzzle was in the original puzzle description at https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/lcs35-puzzle-description... .

abcd_f• 7 years ago

I was going to ask how they would check if the answer is correct, because they too would need "35 years" to find it...

... but then I realized that N is a product of two primes, which Rivest knows, so he can take a shortcut and compute the answer faster. That is, the answer is known.

But this makes you wonder if factoring that N would've been a faster route to solving this puzzle. What do you guys think?

[1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/lcs35-puzzle-description...

jsv• 7 years ago

Congrats!

pieter_mj• 7 years ago

From a fellow Belgian : congratulations!

It's very inspiring to see a self-taught programmer achieve such an impressive result.

Any chance of the capsule ceremony being live streamed? Would be cool to follow.

justindrake• 7 years ago

Ballpark latency numbers per 2048-bit modular multiplication:

CPU—1100ns

FPGA—66ns

ASIC—1ns (expected)

If you're a hardware engineer (or mathematician) interested is building an ultra-low latency ASIC, please email justin@ethereum.org

Source: https://twitter.com/drakefjustin/status/1123143447551053824

Context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqL_cMlPjOI

unclesams-uncle• 7 years ago

Congrats! +32 represent! Which beer(s) did you drink to celebrate?

TacticalCoder27• 7 years ago

Wow quite a few belgian in here! Weirdly enough I'm not that big of a beer drinker but... Although I didn't celebrate finding the solution in any other way than doing a silly dance in front of my family I did celebrate the HN thread reaching 2nd place on the frontpage by drinking a Mort Subite / Lambic Kriek : )

grego• 7 years ago

What would be the off the self hardware (CPU) to use for this problem today? Still Intel, or AMD, or does ARM architecture do squaring fast? Or something else entirely, like GPU?

sah2ed• 7 years ago

OT: Can anyone be kind enough to link to the specific model of TacticalCoder's monitor setup as captured in this Wired photo [0]?

Thanks

0: https://www.wired.com/story/a-programmer-solved-a-20-year-ol...

HNLurker2• 7 years ago

Can someone ELI5?

Belgian programmer solves MIT’s 20-year-old time capsule cryptographic puzzle

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