I asked Claude to "fuzz the circuit" and, while it didn't work, it basically ended up going the Z3/SMT route and solving it in ~3 hours. This is after the writeups were already out, but still, as a software reverser, pretty wild. Writeup: https://www.babush.me/how-not-to-solve-jane-streets-asic-puz...
The EE/IC Design part of me loves this for trying to build a community around what is typically a very opaque and secretive industry. The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.
>>The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.
HFT makes the market more efficient, just like the AI eliminating jobs makes business more efficient. It's been numbing watching HN gladly sacrifice it's own to the altar of AI over and over. There is no moral high ground.
Personally as a retail quant, it's really rewarding to build models that extract edge from the market using the very AI tools that have eliminated all hope of ever re-entering the tech-field absent being an entrepreneurial founder.
>>The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.
It's more efficient now than it used to be - by which I mean the total taken by HFTs is lower than what people used to pay in spreads and commisions. Price discovery is better (you get closer to a fair price if you trade) and spreads are lower. The whole industry that used to prey on spreads and ignorance of retail investors is gone. What not to like about HFT?
They group dozens to hundreds of designs on one chip. The end result is that even hobbyists can afford to have their small ASIC on real silicon. It's still expensive but it's within reach of a serious enthusiast with a steady job.
Western societies in which HFT happens also happen to have the best medicine, leisure (many different sports for example), education etc.
You think you could do better by having a planned economy, with your eminence deciding what's a waste and what is not? And why should I believe you it'd end up differently than North Korea or Cuba?
Or you'd somehow manage to take what you think are all the good parts of western societies while outlawing what's wasteful and we'd have an utopia?
this reply isn't in good faith. OP is being self critical examining contradictions of living in complex interdependent societies. why are your queries so aggressively factional?
There is a very vocal minority of folks that when they come across a comment that at all looks like an opponent of ancap [1], they become unhinged, even in this case where the GP was being internally reflective about their own beliefs.
The irony has most likely circled their drain (which just goes into a creek anyways).
Which is especially ironic when they bring up an example like Cuba, where at least today, you can’t really say whether the policies or de facto sanctioning it receives are at fault for the current economic state.
I don’t think Jane Street does high frequency trading. I think you might be thinking of Citadel or HRT. Jane Street is more of an old-school quant hedge fund, no?
Their bread and butter was, and as far as I know still is, trading in ETFs and ADRs. These things have a mechanism to create and redeem in exchange with underlying securities. This means one can make some money arbitraging differences between the bundle and components.
As this game got more competitive they seem to have branched out into other kinds of business including HFT.
Every time I see a Jane Street puzzle of this like I wonder in which way you can improve your problem solving skills for these things and how to extrapolate patterns from other things. I have a gut feeling that this is not only just grinding puzzles, there has to be a way to improve this. Curious if people have some insights on this
> The hardware team at Jane Street designs FPGAs and ASICs that run some of the fastest trading systems in the world, and the day-to-day work is full of puzzles just like this one: staring at a sea of gates, timing reports, or waveforms and slowly teasing out what’s really going on.
Although not really any more. AI is really good at debugging failing tests so I no longer have to spend hours - sometimes it was even days - staring at waves and instruction traces.
I asked Claude to "fuzz the circuit" and, while it didn't work, it basically ended up going the Z3/SMT route and solving it in ~3 hours. This is after the writeups were already out, but still, as a software reverser, pretty wild. Writeup: https://www.babush.me/how-not-to-solve-jane-streets-asic-puz...
The EE/IC Design part of me loves this for trying to build a community around what is typically a very opaque and secretive industry. The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.
>>The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.
HFT makes the market more efficient, just like the AI eliminating jobs makes business more efficient. It's been numbing watching HN gladly sacrifice it's own to the altar of AI over and over. There is no moral high ground.
Personally as a retail quant, it's really rewarding to build models that extract edge from the market using the very AI tools that have eliminated all hope of ever re-entering the tech-field absent being an entrepreneurial founder.
>>The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.
It's more efficient now than it used to be - by which I mean the total taken by HFTs is lower than what people used to pay in spreads and commisions. Price discovery is better (you get closer to a fair price if you trade) and spreads are lower. The whole industry that used to prey on spreads and ignorance of retail investors is gone. What not to like about HFT?
The upwards money funnel?
Maybe they're both bad?
I work for an HFT (not Jane Street) so I am biased, but we (the HFT industry as a whole) are quite small compared to big tech.
I’d estimate the total global HFT revenue to be 100 billion dollars a year, which is less than Apple and a tiny percentage of all big tech combined.
How is this any more of an upwards money funnel than the prohibitively expensive spreads and commissions that hindered lay access to the markets?
There is an open source silicon community built around multi-project wafer shuttles that has nothing to do with HFT.
Do you mind sharing them and what they do?
Presumably Tiny Tapeout. https://tinytapeout.com/
They group dozens to hundreds of designs on one chip. The end result is that even hobbyists can afford to have their small ASIC on real silicon. It's still expensive but it's within reach of a serious enthusiast with a steady job.
https://app.tinytapeout.com/calculator The number of "devkits" is the number of chips you'll get, the number of tiles is the size of your design. You can see how many tiles current projects use here: https://app.tinytapeout.com/shuttles/ttsky26d
Western societies in which HFT happens also happen to have the best medicine, leisure (many different sports for example), education etc.
You think you could do better by having a planned economy, with your eminence deciding what's a waste and what is not? And why should I believe you it'd end up differently than North Korea or Cuba?
Or you'd somehow manage to take what you think are all the good parts of western societies while outlawing what's wasteful and we'd have an utopia?
this reply isn't in good faith. OP is being self critical examining contradictions of living in complex interdependent societies. why are your queries so aggressively factional?
There is a very vocal minority of folks that when they come across a comment that at all looks like an opponent of ancap [1], they become unhinged, even in this case where the GP was being internally reflective about their own beliefs.
The irony has most likely circled their drain (which just goes into a creek anyways).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
Which is especially ironic when they bring up an example like Cuba, where at least today, you can’t really say whether the policies or de facto sanctioning it receives are at fault for the current economic state.
> You think you could do better by having a planned economy
Nobody mentioned that crazy scenario so why bring it up?
BTW the USA is already a planned economy.
I think they mean a planned economy in the sense of the Soviet Union. The USA is not that, not even close.
I don’t think Jane Street does high frequency trading. I think you might be thinking of Citadel or HRT. Jane Street is more of an old-school quant hedge fund, no?
The page says their hardware team builds the fastest trading systems on the planet. Jane Street does HFT.
Their bread and butter was, and as far as I know still is, trading in ETFs and ADRs. These things have a mechanism to create and redeem in exchange with underlying securities. This means one can make some money arbitraging differences between the bundle and components.
As this game got more competitive they seem to have branched out into other kinds of business including HFT.
Every time I see a Jane Street puzzle of this like I wonder in which way you can improve your problem solving skills for these things and how to extrapolate patterns from other things. I have a gut feeling that this is not only just grinding puzzles, there has to be a way to improve this. Curious if people have some insights on this
> The hardware team at Jane Street designs FPGAs and ASICs that run some of the fastest trading systems in the world, and the day-to-day work is full of puzzles just like this one: staring at a sea of gates, timing reports, or waveforms and slowly teasing out what’s really going on.
Although not really any more. AI is really good at debugging failing tests so I no longer have to spend hours - sometimes it was even days - staring at waves and instruction traces.
Tbh that's one thing I won't miss.
Were AI models able to find the solution and easter eggs?