Results from the Jane Street hardware puzzle ---- - 2 days ago | 10 points | 0 comments - URL: https://blog.janestreet.com/asic-puzzle-results/ - Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49934078 - Summary: Jane Street published results from their ASIC reverse-engineering puzzle, which asked solvers to determine the function of a small chip from its GDS layout. About 400 people from 30+ countries submitted solutions. The chip was a hardware checker for an 11x11 Star Battle puzzle ("Two Not Touch"), requiring exactly two stars per row, column, and region, with no adjacent stars. Solvers used various approaches: extracting gate-level netlists with tools like KLayout and Magic, simulating circuits, tracing logic backwards from the success output, dynamic exploration with impulse testing, SAT solving, and reverse-engineering the LFSR-obfuscated output generator. The solution string was "(* TWO STARS *)". The layout contained several Easter eggs, including a Morse code message, a Jane Street logo made of metal shapes, and hidden failure messages. The post highlights notable submissions, including FPGA synthesis, Minecraft recreation, SPICE simulation, and zero-knowledge proofs. Takeaways emphasize that AI tools are changing how such challenges are approached, and that solvers who verified their tools with additional tests found hidden bugs. The post also promotes Jane Street's hardware team and an upcoming ASIC competition.