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Comment by LatticeAnimal | Hacker News Reader

Some of the asymmetry might be regained if anubis had thousands of variations of PoW algorithms, each different enough that they must be solved independently.

I wonder if AI might be able to come up with new PoW algorithms in a nightly CI job so every day is a different puzzle...

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> I wonder if AI might be able to come up with new PoW algorithms in a nightly CI job so every day is a different puzzle...

This is something I'm working on in a prototype. Stay tuned!

hashx kind of already does it.

...That sounds like entropy? As in, the thing computers are bad at (truly random numbers) and /dev/urandom in your kernel already spits out an approximation of?

You can do this on yours. Just have the client and server add an extra "2" after the challenge key or something. A different client which extracts the challenge key and does its own processing will only generate invalid responses.

Cool, so then that invalidates the ASIC problem, right?

My earlier idea was to imagine that each day Anubis picks an entirely different problem-class. Ex: one day it is Sha256, the next it is prime factorization, the next it is twin-prime-finding, the next it is cracking elliptic curves, the next it is some kind of sorting / information theory problem...

All with the goal of adapting constantly so that scrapers have a harder time optimizing for the PoW problem (i.e. with Sha256 ASICs)

That doesn't work because there is a finite list to choose from.

Nobody is using ASICs on Anubis.

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