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 Forum index » Diversions » Perplex City Puzzle Cards » PXC: Silver Puzzle Cards
[PUZZLE] #251 - Silver - The Thirteenth Labour - READ POST#1
Moderators: AnthraX101, bagsbee, BrianEnigma, cassandra, Giskard, lhall, Mikeyj, myf, poozle, RobMagus, xnbomb
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DJ FreeMason
Boot

Joined: 30 Mar 2006
Posts: 66

 		It runs on the school's computers. Now to get the first connection. It is encountering congestion, but it could be from the school not allowing connection. I'll have to download it for my home computer.

PostPosted: Tue May 09, 2006 12:17 pm
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poozleModerator
Entrenched

Joined: 15 Aug 2005
Posts: 1090

 		I have to ask, what happened arround april 28th? There is a sudden drop of 500 clients all at once. Is it some glitch or what because I really wonder what happened.

PostPosted: Tue May 09, 2006 8:57 pm
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chimera245
Decorated

Joined: 09 Mar 2006
Posts: 209
Quote:
I have to ask, what happened arround april 28th? There is a sudden drop of 500 clients all at once. Is it some glitch or what because I really wonder what happened.


I expired inactive clients, and recycled their unprocessed units.

I do this periodically (another purge is coming).

BTW the Congestion issues are simply queuing at the Web Server (I must change the wording of that message). These simply indicate the volume of work units we are getting through now - most likely 70-80000 Work Units today.

I am adjusting the server configuration to ease us through this period - but with the release of client 1.2 (in alpha now) which handles multiple work units, this should ease.

PostPosted: Tue May 09, 2006 9:50 pm
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QBKooky
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Joined: 24 Jul 2004
Posts: 281

 		I posted this in the LJ, but maybe posting it here would be better:

Quote:
The new client is excellent! I've gone from 15-20 minutes a WU to 4-5 minutes.

Request: could somebody who knows about such things crunch the numbers to see how much longer it might take with the current number of clients (~1625) computing with the new client? I know we can't know for sure (since the answer might be at 10% or 99% of all WU's completed) but I think it'd be fun to see the huge difference this new client has made. Very Happy (I realize this is sort of answered in the 13thlabour.tk FAQ, but never hurts to ask again?)


Also, does anyone else have this fear that we'll get through 100% of the work units and not have an answer? Maybe that's just me. Razz
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PostPosted: Tue May 09, 2006 11:28 pm
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DJ FreeMason
Boot

Joined: 30 Mar 2006
Posts: 66
QBKooky wrote:
I posted this in the LJ, but maybe posting it here would be better:

Quote:
The new client is excellent! I've gone from 15-20 minutes a WU to 4-5 minutes.

Request: could somebody who knows about such things crunch the numbers to see how much longer it might take with the current number of clients (~1625) computing with the new client? I know we can't know for sure (since the answer might be at 10% or 99% of all WU's completed) but I think it'd be fun to see the huge difference this new client has made. Very Happy (I realize this is sort of answered in the 13thlabour.tk FAQ, but never hurts to ask again?)


Also, does anyone else have this fear that we'll get through 100% of the work units and not have an answer? Maybe that's just me. Razz


That would horrendously suck. I mean suck like nobody's business. However, I really wouldn't care that much, since it's my computer and not be grinding through the numbers.

PostPosted: Tue May 09, 2006 11:43 pm
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QBKooky
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Joined: 24 Jul 2004
Posts: 281

 		I figured, why the heck not, so I decided to try the number-crunch on my own. Here are my results.

18,466,744,073,709,551,615 possible keys
/ 16,777,214 (the keys in one WU)
= 1,099,511,758,848 work units

1,099,511,758,848 work units
- 761,068 work units already completed
= 1,099,510,997,780 work units left

1,099,510,997,780 work units left
/ (5 min/wu * 1625 clients running)
= 135324430 minutes
= 93975 days
= 257 years, give or take, assuming we remain at about 1625 clients averaging 5 minutes per wu.

Anyone care to correct my maths, or does that look about right? (I haven't accounted for leap years).
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PostPosted: Tue May 09, 2006 11:51 pm
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jazzychad
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Joined: 03 May 2006
Posts: 74

 		more math...
Well... here's another way to analyze it, perhaps...
according to the Live Journal:
When we hit the 1% mark there were 140,000 WU done. That was April 19th.

We hit the 5% mark today: May 9th.

That's a difference of 20 days. So we completed 5%-1% = 4% in 20 days.

That means the total amount of time should be
(100%/4%)*20 days = 500 days (or 1.37 years).

Plus, as more people join the force and the client gets faster (let's hope), this number will get even smaller...

Also, if the numbers from the progress bar is right, I calculate that there are a total of approx. 14,724,150 wu. Is that right? That's 5 entire orders of magnitude off from QBKooky's number. Or is this the number for only low-order ascii keys?

I got that from 100%/5.18%*762711wu.

Btw, where did you find the number of keys/wu?

PostPosted: Wed May 10, 2006 12:32 am
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chimera245
Decorated

Joined: 09 Mar 2006
Posts: 209

 		Hi,

I think someone's numbers are way out.


There are 62 ^ 8 combinations (using our 62 byte alphabet) in the keyspace.

This is broken down into 14.8 million (62 ^4) Units of 14.8million evaluations (62 ^4)

We are doing say 74000 Work Units Per day.

14,800,000 / 74000 = 200 days for the whole Keyspace

100 days for 50% of the keyspace.

PostPosted: Wed May 10, 2006 12:36 am
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QBKooky
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Joined: 24 Jul 2004
Posts: 281

 		My numbers on Work units and total possibilities were from the PPC Wiki:

http://perplexcitywiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Rccrypt_Work_Unit_checkout
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PostPosted: Wed May 10, 2006 12:40 am
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jazzychad
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Joined: 03 May 2006
Posts: 74
chimera245 wrote:
14,800,000 / 74000 = 200 days for the whole Keyspace


Right, I should have mentioned in my post that my calculations made the (rather stupid) generalization that there has been a constant slope of work units completed from day 0. As of late the slope is ever increasing, obviously meaning a huge decrease in the total time it will take. So, to be pedantic let's say I found an upper bound Laughing

PostPosted: Wed May 10, 2006 1:06 am
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Sh1ft
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Joined: 12 Nov 2003
Posts: 110
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
QBKooky wrote:

Also, does anyone else have this fear that we'll get through 100% of the work units and not have an answer? Maybe that's just me. Razz


This does not mean that the effort is wasted, it just means that the most likely candidates have been completed. If the correct text wasn't found, we would continue processing with the next likely keyspace. (I'm sure that others could elucidate more eloquently.)

PostPosted: Wed May 10, 2006 1:26 am
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chimera245
Decorated

Joined: 09 Mar 2006
Posts: 209
QBKooky wrote:
My numbers on Work units and total possibilities were from the PPC Wiki:
http://perplexcitywiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Rccrypt_Work_Unit_checkout


Ahh - thanks for that. I'd completely forgotten that page even existed.

I'll have words with the guys about getting that changed - as it is more than a little out of date.

The numbers on that page assume we are using a full 255 character alphabet - giving a key space of 255 ^ 8 - but a consensus was formed sometime afterwards that a more likely alphabet is:

A-Z, a-z and 0-9

It is this alphabet of 62 characters that we are using.

The basis of this decision was on the likely time to solve the puzzle. Assuming that MC intended for this puzzle to be solveable, 237 years to solve it (1600 odd clients) is way too long, as you so rightly pointed out. There are obviously other points that we could have picked, there are natural breaks at 52 characters (A-z only), 62 (our set), 93ish (printables), 127 (signed ASCII set), 255 (full key range).

The number of possibilities (and times) are (Assuming 70000WU * 14.7M solves per day as our current rate):

62 key - 200 days
93 key - 5500 days
127 key - 65000 days

As sh1ft points out - if we need to expand the key space - so be it. It is really a matter of prioritization. Once we have eliminated all of the combinations using this key space - if we need to add other combinations - they will also most likely be done in priority.

Just as an aside I originally planned to prioritize the 62 character keyspace according to English rules (i.e. 0000000 is less likely than 13Labour as a combo) - but decided against it. The structures for that are still in the database though.

At the current rate of 1% every couple of days however - I don't see the need to.

PostPosted: Wed May 10, 2006 2:11 am
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jazzychad
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Joined: 03 May 2006
Posts: 74
Sh1ft wrote:
QBKooky wrote:

Also, does anyone else have this fear that we'll get through 100% of the work units and not have an answer? Maybe that's just me. Razz


This does not mean that the effort is wasted, it just means that the most likely candidates have been completed.


Or it means the the client code was wrong and we decyphered it incorrectly! Shocked Shocked

j/k... i'm sure the coders made it right.. tho the 64 bit word-size worried me since there seemed to be some initial confusion whether to use 2 blocks of 64bits or 2 blocks of 32bits to make 64 during the decyphering algorithm...

PostPosted: Wed May 10, 2006 2:42 am
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Sh1ft
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Joined: 12 Nov 2003
Posts: 110
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
jazzychad wrote:

Or it means the the client code was wrong and we decyphered it incorrectly!


The client code is not wrong as it is based upon rccrypt which is Von's clue! This means that the encoder used rccrypt and we are brute-forcing using an (faster) variation of rccrypt.

PostPosted: Wed May 10, 2006 3:28 am
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Seej
Unfettered


Joined: 30 Nov 2004
Posts: 614
chimera245 wrote:
Quote:
I have to ask, what happened arround april 28th? There is a sudden drop of 500 clients all at once. Is it some glitch or what because I really wonder what happened.


I expired inactive clients, and recycled their unprocessed units.

I do this periodically (another purge is coming).

BTW the Congestion issues are simply queuing at the Web Server (I must change the wording of that message). These simply indicate the volume of work units we are getting through now - most likely 70-80000 Work Units today.

I am adjusting the server configuration to ease us through this period - but with the release of client 1.2 (in alpha now) which handles multiple work units, this should ease.


Is the server actually queuing requests, or does it just serve the next request that comes in? I only ask because my client has been trying to validate for about 90mins now and I hate to think of all the other cycles that must be going to waste too. The stats even seem to be going wonky since the new client was released.

If the server is having trouble handling requests would it be possible to use two servers? For example, taking half of the incomplete WU's and putting them on the second server, then patching the client so that it checks first one server and then, if it encounters congestion, the second server.

If it's any help, I've got my own domain with some webspace and bandwidth going spare. Not sure off the top of my head what sort of processes I could run on there since the most dynamic thing I use at the moment is a bit of PHP, but if you PM me with details I can check into it for you. I'd offer to cobble together my own dedicated server too, but my IP is assigned dynamically (I'm on DSL) so whenever my connection gets dropped and reconnected it's reassigned a different IP.

PostPosted: Wed May 10, 2006 2:00 pm
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