Hey all,
now that the dust settled a bit I've got some time to post about it and it's geeky enough for "Other geeky stuff"...
Some may have seen it as it was frontpage on Hacker News for quite a few hours (2nd position actually) and was in the news here and there (it was even on TV).
Long story short: in 1999 the MIT organized a big party to celebrate the 35th anniversay of the Laboratory of Computer Science (LCS, now called CSAIL since it merged with the AI lab). During this event several computing and Internet pionneers did put stuff (papers, discs, PCBs, ...) inside a "time capsule" (a big lead bag made by architect Frank Gehry), including Tim Berners Lee, Bill Gates, the VisiCalc authors (the first spreadsheet program ever), Metcalfe (Ethernet), the first RSA paper and many other insane things.
The capsule was to be opened in 2034 or when someone would find the answer to a cryptographic challenge Ron Rivest (the 'R' from RSA) created back in 1999 and which was supposed to take 35 years before being solvable, taking Moore's Law into account.
Incredibly enough Rivest didn't hear anything about this puzzle for 20 years (he mentioned it himself several times and LCS35 was mentioned on forums / blogs / tweets etc. but nobody contacted Rivest about it for 20 years) and then... Within 24 hours he got an email from a team announcing they'd have the solution withing a month and an email by me saying I had the solution.
So yeah, I was the first to find the solution, about 6 weeks ago. I got invited for one week at the MIT's CSAIL to meet Ron Rivest and talk in public (room was full, so there was an "overflow room" where the talks were streamed) about how I solved LCS35.
I got to spend a few hours with Ron Rivest, spent one hour in Sussman's office who dedicated me a copy of SICP (aka "the purple book") and by chance Abelson was in his office so he signed the book too (!), met amazing people the whole week on campus. I also met the team who configured a FPGA running a custom algorithm to solve LCS35 in two months. My whole week in Cambridge was crazy.
The little Wikipedia page about LCS35:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCS35An article about the solution (with a pic of me in front of my HHKB Pro JP and 38" curved screen):
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2019/05/21/bernard-fabrot-mit-puzzleAlso RIP my 4 years old core i7 6700 (non K) CPU: the time capsule was opened, all the items pulled out, then all pull back in and new ones added... Including my core i7 6700. It was the 2nd best CPU for single-core performance back when I bought it (with only the 6700K better but I took a 6700 to get slightly lower max TDP and less noise) and single-core spec is all that mattered to solve LCS35 (which is why I bought that CPU back then). Now ofc there are better ones. So yup, made a gift to the MIT's CSAIL: my trusty core i7-6700 who ran one core at 100% 3.9 to 4.0 Ghz nearly non stop for 3.3 years has earned a very long rest alongside amazing artefacts.
Hope you like the story,
