3 ms·

I want to do this eventually, but it's hard to split things into the micro-tasks that would be required to make this work on Anubis. One of the ideas I'm throwi

by xena 27d ago

I want to do this eventually, but it's hard to split things into the micro-tasks that would be required to make this work on Anubis. One of the ideas I'm throwing around is a world where Anubis helps fuzz old games to find timesaves in tool-assisted speedruns. It's harder than you think.

brendoelfrendo 27d ago
This would be rad.
YoshiRulz 27d ago
The tools that exist for fuzzing speedruns (TASers call it "botting") are fairly primitive, excluding a few game-specific ones. Because of that, there really aren't that many TASes where a distributed randomised search could make improvements which don't get immediately overshadowed within a day of human attention. Improving botting tools and increasing their adoption would be more effective IMO. (Incidentally, TASVideos.org recently banned one of the people pioneering bot development.) Meanwhile BOINC is well-established as the platform for distributed computation. If you can figure out how to squeeze its work units into Wasm challenges, I'm sure a lot of researchers would thank you.
- thunderfork 26d ago
  BOINC isn't really built for "small tasks", afaik. Once you get small enough, the work the server is doing to manage the tasks gets to be around the same cost as the server just doing the tasks itself.
keeda 26d ago
Yeah, I'm using PoW-based "DDOS defense mechanism" for a current project and had this thought too. I briefly looked into what it would take to exploit PoW to do something economically valuable like folding@home, and it looked a bit tricky. At first glance, these sort of projects seem a bit unsuitable for real-time PoW because they were designed to be run on desktops and so tend to do things in large batches. There probably are other use-cases that could be more suitable though. Might be worth chucking that thought into Astra, especially if someone springs the $$$ money for it?

by xena 27d ago

brendoelfrendo 27d ago

This would be rad.

YoshiRulz 27d ago

The tools that exist for fuzzing speedruns (TASers call it "botting") are fairly primitive, excluding a few game-specific ones. Because of that, there really aren't that many TASes where a distributed randomised search could make improvements which don't get immediately overshadowed within a day of human attention. Improving botting tools and increasing their adoption would be more effective IMO. (Incidentally, TASVideos.org recently banned one of the people pioneering bot development.) Meanwhile BOINC is well-established as the platform for distributed computation. If you can figure out how to squeeze its work units into Wasm challenges, I'm sure a lot of researchers would thank you.

thunderfork 26d ago
BOINC isn't really built for "small tasks", afaik. Once you get small enough, the work the server is doing to manage the tasks gets to be around the same cost as the server just doing the tasks itself.

keeda 26d ago

Yeah, I'm using PoW-based "DDOS defense mechanism" for a current project and had this thought too. I briefly looked into what it would take to exploit PoW to do something economically valuable like folding@home, and it looked a bit tricky. At first glance, these sort of projects seem a bit unsuitable for real-time PoW because they were designed to be run on desktops and so tend to do things in large batches. There probably are other use-cases that could be more suitable though. Might be worth chucking that thought into Astra, especially if someone springs the $$$ money for it?