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At the beginning of April In 1999, a time capsule was delivered to the famous architect Frank Gehry with instruction to incorporate it into his plans for the building to house the MIT computer and artificial intelligence laboratory, or CSAIL. The time capsule was essentially a museum of the early history of computer science, containing 50 books such as Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee.
The time capsule should not be open until age 35, unless someone can decipher the cryptographic puzzle included in its design. The puzzle was designed by Ron Rivest, whose name lends the "R" to RSA, arguably one of the most important cryptographic protocols ever created. He says it was not designed to be complicated. Instead, Rivest created the puzzle so that it would take almost 35 years to calculate the answer.
On April 15, almost 20 years after Rivest announced the puzzle, Bernard Fabrot, a Belgian self-taught programmer, solved it. The original instructions in the puzzle dictated that the solution be passed on to the director of the Computer Lab, but Fabrot said he was surprised to learn that the lab did not exist anymore. (It was merged with the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 2003 to create CSAIL.) In fact, Fabrot said that CSAIL's director, Daniela Rus, was not even aware of the puzzle's existence. he told her he had the solution.
The Rivest puzzle was essentially to find the number resulting from a quadrature operation performed nearly 80 trillion times. For example, if you start with square 2, you will get 4, then square 4 to get 16, and then repeat this process 80 trillion times more. You then take the number you arrive at and perform a mathematical operation that uses that number and a given number in the puzzle instructions. This creates a new number that can be translated into a short congratulatory sentence. (Rivest and Fabrot refused to reveal the exact phrase that will be announced at the opening of the time capsule on May 15.)
The key to this puzzle is that it requires sequential operations, which means that you can not get an answer faster by using parallel computing. You must follow the quadrature process, step by step, based on the previous answers, to find the solution. So using more computers or running a supercomputer will not help you. According to Moore's law and the time it took to manage the quadrature operation in 1999, Rivest estimated that the calculation of the puzzle solution would take about 35 years.
Fabrot, who works as an independent developer, claims to have stumbled upon the puzzle in 2015. Although Rivest initially released the puzzle code in Java, Fabrot realized that it could be solved. more quickly he used the GNU multiple precision arithmetic library, free software. in C to make "precise arithmetic calculations". Fabrot has therefore dedicated one of the processor cores of its desktop computer to perform quadrature operations to solve the puzzle. He said his computer was running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, except when he had to go on vacation or in the event of a power outage.
"During all these years, I did not tell anyone that I was trying to solve the puzzle, with the exception of very close friends," says Fabrot. "I knew I had a chance, but if I had warned anyone, he could have used a more powerful processor to double me."
Three and a half years later, Fabrot ended up making about 80,000 billion square operations and found the solution to the puzzle. It could not have been better. Fabrot did not know it, but a group of computer scientists and cryptography experts were working on a project called Cryptophage, which used specialized hardware specifically designed to solve the MIT puzzle.
Under the leadership of Simon Peffers, a former Intel engineer, the Cryptophage group was looking for verifiable delay functions as a possible security mechanism for block chains like Ethereum. Verifiable delay functions are a modern interpretation of Rivest's early work on delayed cryptography, and their solution can only be derived by sequential operations. According to Peffers, in the course of their research, the Cryptophage group discovered the Rivest puzzle, which seemed to be a good way to put their research to the test.
In mid-March, the group started running an algorithm designed by Erdinc Ozturk, a researcher at Sabanci University, which was optimized to reduce the delay between quadrature operations. This algorithm has been implemented on a user programmable gate array, a versatile chip programmed to run only a specific algorithm, which makes it more efficient than a versatile processor. Using the Ozturk algorithm, this FPGA was about 10 times faster than a commercial high-end processor running unoptimized software.
Based on the computer efficiency of the chip, the Cryptophage group calculated that it would have the appropriate solution to the MIT puzzles on the evening of May 10, just two months after the start of the calculation. Yet, when they contacted MIT to let them know that a solution was imminent, Rivest informed them that Fabrot had beaten them all the way.
"We did not have anyone until these two came to us almost the same day to tell us" we solved your problem, "says Rivest. "It's an amazing coincidence."
Rivest does not hesitate to admit that he had overestimated the difficulty of his puzzle. Making predictions of technological improvements is difficult over such a long time, and Rivest says it does not anticipate breakthroughs such as FPGA chips, which were not as sophisticated or as widely available as today. hui.
Although the Cryptophage group was not the first to solve the problem, Peffers said he would still be present at the opening ceremony of the time capsule on May 15th. Only the designers of the capsule know the full content, even if it includes contributions from Tim Berners. Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web; Bob Metcalfe, who invented Ethernet; and Bill Gates, who contributed to the original version of Altair BASIC, the first product from Microsoft. Fabrot said he was very happy to see an original copy of one of the first PC games, Zork, included in the capsule.
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