This week the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of MIT (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory or simply CSAIL) he said that one encrypted puzzle that exists here and 20 years was solved by a self-taught programmer from Belgium, 15 years earlier than expected by MIT scientists.
Bernard Fabrot spent the last three years calculating in a puzzle originally announced by 1999's MIT researchers. Separately, another team headed by technician Simon Peffers almost approached the completion of the design of a solution.
The puzzle essentially involves conducting approximately 80 trillions of sequential squarings and was designed to stop any attempt to solve it using parallel computers.
Fabrot and Peffers, however, used very different approaches to the puzzle. Fabrot used a simple Intel Core i7-6700 processor and computed the solution using the multifunction bibliographycase GNU Arithmetic Precision (GMP).
Meanwhile, Peffers' team used a new quadrature algorithm (designed by Erdinç Öztürk of Sabanci University) to run on a programmable hardware accelerator called an FPGA. The team appears to be well on their way to completing the puzzle on May 11 after two months of calculations.
"There have been advances in both hardware and software far beyond what I predicted in 1999," says MIT professor Ron Rivest, who first announced the puzzle in April 1999 celebrating its 35th anniversary. investigations at MIT's Computer Science Laboratory (now CSAIL).
"The underlying challenge of the puzzle of about 80 trillion squarings remains very difficult, but the resources required to realize a single square have been reduced far beyond what I anticipated."
The puzzle is an example of a "verifiable delay function" (VDF), which means that the answer can only be found after a certain number of steps.
Because VDFs can also be used to create objective randomness, they have been suggested as possible approaches to improve the security and scalability of blockchain systems such as Ethereum and Filecoin.
In the initial announcement, MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science promised that if a proper solution was not found, they would open a special "capsule" designed by architect Frank Gehry filled with historical artifacts from people such as Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
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