How I Cracked Jane Street's ASIC Reverse Engineering Challenge
Solving the Jane Street Reverse Engineering Challenge
Jane Street's ASIC challenge lured the author into a month-long rabbit hole. This post recounts the journey from decoding GDS files to extracting a working circuit, complete with self-built tools, dead ends, and a successful warmup solve. It's a technical overview that sets the stage for deeper dives into each step.
By beating my bloodied face against the keyboard for several hours and cursing how long I’ve already spent on this, I’ve managed to nail down a tricky bug.
- mdritch
I love z3. I used it for the first time for Jane Street's puzzle last year involving a hashing alg disguised as a neural network. I use a lot of MCMC at work and I have made a few small investigations into MCMC model formal verification via z3, but nothing real yet. This has inspired me to pick that back up.
- josu
I gave the problem to chatGPT 5.6 Sol Pro and this was the result:
> Worked for 12m 36s
> Solved
- ctippett
> I ended up using a tool called ‘z3’. It’s kind of magical? Every time it finds a solution I get a surge of joy.
This resonates so much. I had a similar feeling after going to my very first operations research lecture. Solving seemingly incomprehensibly complex problems by framing them as a bunch of simple constraints and getting a solution seemed like such magic.
- piker
> Well I don’t really know what to work on next
Let me help you: work on figuring out how to spend the millions of dollars every year Jane Street will pay you to clock in. I've heard private aviation is expensive, for example. :)
- xvilka
To help with such tasks for real chips (given the good quality images) there is Degate[1][2] open source software.