Hacker News Reader

Comment by spoonjim | Hacker News Reader

It was cracked by a handful of individuals PLUS the several hundred/thousand other individuals who tried and failed. It is more reasonably seen as the efforts of every qualified person who gave it serious effort.

The FBI is not going to automatically hire the people who will succeed at this vs. fail valiantly. To get the same results they would have to dedicate the same resources which would be huge.

View on HN

You forgot this part, they used Spartan HPC.

"It consists of 72 nodes, each with four NVIDIA P100 graphics cards, which can provide a theoretical maximum of around 900 teraflops."

I don't know how much time and computational power they used, but it explains why the problem was not solved for a long time.

I don't get the impression that several hundred/thousand individuals had anything to do with this being solved by this person, except perhaps by virtue of not solving it and thereby leaving it to be an open problem with the opportunity to be solved.

After reading the article, this didn't come across as a "standing on the shoulders of giants" situation, but rather that this person by chance had the problem, found it interesting enough to work on, and happened to try the right path to solve it.

Sure but each person seriously attempting it still increased the probability of a solution arising

Sure but still mutually exclusive from this specific attempt.

Right, but if the FBI goes and hires a code breaker, they don’t get one of the three who solved it. They get one of the thousands with the credentials to have a reasonable chance of success. So if the FBI wants to put the three who solved it on the job, they have to deploy the thousand who didn’t because they don’t know the difference between them until it’s solved.

How about the FBI builds a time machine, goes to the future to find out who solved it, then hires those people? I call it self-fulfilling cryptography.

Still survivorship bias. We tend to assume that because they cracked it, anyone like them could've done that in the past. In reality, maybe even the author had a chance of 0.001% to crack it and they just got lucky in choosing the right paths and having the right intuitions.

It's the same in many parts of research. You obviously would've had no chance without their expertise but just because a researcher discovers something new does not mean there's no luck involved.

I think the point of the person to whom you're replying is that it being solved doesn't mean it was as easy as it now looks. When we see it done and we see the methods are not all that novel, we are biased to think that. But the fact that it was not more complete until then and was a subject of fascination for many actually implies the opposite. We're looking at an incredibly rare event and asking why a few specific investigators couldn't have achieved that decades ago.

The "decades ago" caveat is especially key, because they used a computer system with raw performance well within an order of magnitude of today's Top500 supercomputers. I like to point out government incompetence too, but spending that kind of resources banging away at a message from a killer we don't believe has been active for several decades isn't exactly a prudent move.

I wasn't saying that this was actual literally an interview problem for intelligence services. It was sort of a joke riffing off the possibility that this was already solved before, simply because it seems like it's within the technical capabilities of intelligence agencies (and academic research teams, perhaps) to crack this code. And the joke was that it wasn't even for gating purposes, but more like an introductory first homework assignment for the elite of elites.

I'm not diminishing the tremendous work done by these codebreakers, I'm just speculating if it was already achievable by institutions, just not revealed publicly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com