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  • Oh no

    The neural net engineering challenge was so awesome, I got really into it, spent way too much time and then was shocked when I actually managed to solve it. Since then I've gotten interested in... hardware. God help me

    by ngriffiths
  • There's a typo on your link to the two stars image.

    It should be `/img/two-stars.png` instead it's right now `/img/two-starts.pgn`.

    For those interested in the image itself: https://jestoph.com/img/two-stars.png

    by aavshr
  • Nice! I ended up using the KLayout Python API to parse the GDS and extract the netlist, which was actually quite nice to use.

    Also, yosys has support for doing “assertion checking”, which I used in my solution: https://sunaabh.com/systems/2026/08/18/jspuzzle.html

    by BalistaCRATZ
  • I'm not sure I've ever seen such a vicious case of NIH-syndrome. Regardless, congrats on the solve!
    by swiftcoder
  • Hi 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...

    by anitil
  • To help with such tasks for real chips (given the good quality images) there is Degate[1][2] open source software.

    [1] https://www.degate.org/

    [2] https://github.com/DegateCommunity/Degate

    by xvilka
  • I love z3. I used it for the first time for Jane Street's puzzle last year involving a hashing alg disguised as a neural network. I use a lot of MCMC at work and I have made a few small investigations into MCMC model formal verification via z3, but nothing real yet. This has inspired me to pick that back up.
    by mdritch
  • > 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.

    by ctippett

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