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This is like Proof-of-Work, but for an extremely small amount of work, that would already overwhelm human effort, like computing a single SHA256.

Every single cryptocurrency (except one or two) concentrates wealth on the founders and early adopters.

> In France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Ireland and Scandinavia, however

What are the Low Countries? Is that a mis-translation of the Netherlands?


Meanwhile, a single human cell's DNA stretches for about 2 meter, one human's DNA stretches for about 2 x 5.4 trillion meter, and all living human DNA for a whopping 8.6 x 10^22 meters, nearly a thousand times longer than the fungi networks...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1gfq6k2/how...


Those fungi networks also have DNA


Shor doesn't solve an NP hard problem. It's even possible that factoring and discrete log are in P, while P != NP.

The paper builds on the results of "Nonlinear quantum mechanics implies polynomial-time solution for NP-complete and #P problems" by Abrams and Loyd [1], from which I quote:

> The last qubit now contains all the information that we need; however, for small s, a measurement of the last qubit will almost always return |0>, yielding no information. > We wish to distinguish between the cases s=0 and s>0.

> Step 4. Repeatedly apply the nonlinear operation to drive the states representing these two cases apart at an exponential rate: eventually, at a time determined by a polynomial function of the number of qubits n, the number of solutions s, and the rate of spreading (Lyapunov exponent) λ, the two cases will become macroscopically distinguishable.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9801041


I think Oppo is the first to visibly eliminate the crease with their Find N6.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/i-tried-oppos-latest-foldable-pho...


> eliminate

I don't think that word means what you think it means.


One of the main instruments of obfuscation (and the way to get more out of the size constraints) is making the code as short as possible, so in that example you'd prefer

    if (!(x/2-1)) { ...
EDIT: Oops, confused the original with x==2 || x==3. Instead, we can use !(x-1>>1), which precedence rules parse as !((x-1)>>1).


I checked this in an online C-compiler and it is not equivalent to x==1 | x==2.

this statement is equivalent to x==2 | x==3.

For example, x=3, 3/2 = 1 then 1-1 = 0 so that !(0) is 1 or true. Also for x=1, 1/2 = 0 then 0-1 = -1 and !(-1) = 0 or false.

I agree with your point in general though about size constraints.


It's pretty easy to see what that does though, even if it is shorter. Wouldn't the other approach be more obfuscated?


extrano84 already found some errors but also 0 will fail and if x is int (instead of unsigned int) all negative numbers will also fail (but so will the original s-macke obfuscation as well).




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_the_flag_(cybersecurit...

still has no mention of AI, but that will likely change as they increasingly dominate competition.


Using AI on CTF is like using a car to get better at the 100 yard dash


Yeah but for the brief time window (which is probably coming to an end right now) where getting your name on the leaderboards was still worth it anyway, because people had not yet realized that the game is over, players will use the car anyway. Now that the game is over, leaderboards are meaningless, so we will figure out ways to move past that (like playing with people who care). But that will change the game in unavoidable ways: the tiny, fragmented scale will give less incentive for creators to come up with massive intricate complex challenges (it would be like hoping Bethesda would make Skyrim for a handful of die hard players). And soon, maybe on a few years, people will invariably start questioning whether it even makes sense to waste their time with this hobby if learning CTF skills is basically useless in an AI dominated world. There are still people learning Assembly for fun, but almost nobody does Assembly programming challenges as a hobby.


Except some people want to win and don't care about their own personal performance.


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