Sunday, 18 October 2026

The NIST P-curve “random” seeds were a 1997 timestamp and lrand48

For decades the seeds behind P-256 and friends were rumoured to be hashes of a secret English sentence. An Anthropic team (with an internal model doing much of the digging) spotted an improbable run of zero top bits, guessed a weak 1990s PRNG, and used brute force plus LLL lattice reduction to recover the state. All ten prime-curve seeds came from lrand48 seeded with Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998. Some base points came from the FreeLIP library’s generator.

Filippo Valsorda reimplemented it in Go and confirmed the claim. That leaves roughly 30 bits of freedom, too few to plant a backdoor. The $36,864 bounty goes to Let’s Encrypt’s ISRG. P-224/256/384/521 base points remain unexplained.

Anthropic · Filippo Valsorda

First Proof batch three: AI solves up to 9 of 10 unpublished research problems

Ten new unpublished problems were refereed double-blind by about 30 mathematicians. The ProofCouncil harness solved 9, GPT-6 Astra on its own solved 7 (for $36), and an open-weight Kimi K3 entry solved none. Every problem fell to at least one system. Citations and exposition still lag: even the best system scored negative on presentation for a third of its answers.

First Proof press release · Results

How the Claude Code team reviews code when Claude writes 90% of it

Multiple agents hunt bugs, a separate group votes on each finding, and every confirmed finding must be fixed or explicitly dismissed with a reason. Review stops after three rounds, and a PR that still hasn’t converged prompts a rethink of the approach. Past reverts and incidents become the reviewer’s eval set. Human approvals scale with the risk of the change, not the author: none for docs, two for billing or CI. Mean review rounds to pass fell from 2.08 to 1.32.

The interesting part is the convergence controls: flag the whole class of a bug rather than one instance, and track whether authors fix or reject each comment.

Claude blog

Claude redesigns quantum circuits: 17× fewer gates for elliptic-curve point addition

Claude got plain-language specs for eight quantum subroutines and a scorer (qubits × gates), then ran for hours with no human in the loop. One run lasted 53 hours. It beat the best published designs, including a divstep-based reversible modular inversion and a Berlekamp–Massey Reed–Solomon decoder for DQI with about 12× fewer gates than Google’s. The researchers note it was too conservative and needed a push to try riskier ideas.

Anthropic

esp32sim runs unmodified ESP32 firmware in the browser

This open-source Rust emulator boots the real mask ROM, the second-stage bootloader and an unmodified app image through to FreeRTOS. The S3 support is mature, with C3 and C6 in draft. It models UART, GPIO, SPI flash, GDMA, crypto blocks, I2S, RMT and I2C, plus a virtual WPA2 access point. An AArch64 JIT runs the S3 at roughly 150–240 M instructions/s, and the S3 has been checked in JTAG lock-step against real silicon. It also builds to WebAssembly and has breakpoints, watchpoints and a PC profiler.

GitHub

Making a pretty sky in Godot: Around The World devlog

Thomas ten Cate’s sea-exploration game gets proper clouds. He uses a Monte Carlo multiple-scattering lookup table (built with a custom Rust ray tracer), and tilts cloud normals toward the sky so they pick up blue by day and pink at sunset. A “cheap hack” bends the horizon to suit a planet 75× smaller than Earth. The sun and moon are driven by a simulated in-engine orrery, so sunrise times vary with latitude and season.

Almost every trick here would carry straight over to a balloon game, where the sky is most of the screen.

Frozen Fractal

“You could have invented transformers from memory”

Alex Wang’s essay treats linear layers, MLPs and attention as associative memories that recall values by key similarity. Capacity is limited by interference: a linear store holds about as many memories as its key dimension. Sharp softmax recall suppresses weak matches and takes a 64-dimensional key from dozens of retrievable memories to over a million. The essay rebuilds attention as the obvious fix rather than a mysterious invention.

alexwang.ai

Making chicken transparent with Dorito dust, at home

The yellow food dye tartrazine was shown last year to make tissue see-through: it raises the refractive index of the water around proteins and lipids, so less light scatters. A hobbyist tried the experiment on chicken breast with a jeweller’s scale and test tubes. He got a 5 mm grid showing through a gummy-bear-textured slice, which is partial success. The write-up is honest about every protocol shortcut and why the result fell short, and includes a Lorentz-oscillator derivation of why red light passes through.

chillphysicsenjoyer

Doomsday was scheduled for Friday, 13 November 2026

In 1960 Heinz von Foerster and two students fitted 24 historical population estimates to a hyperbolic curve and published “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026” in Science, the date population would go to infinity. The fit tracked reality until about 1993, when birth rates fell. Global birth rates are now a little under half their 1960 level, which is the halving the paper said would avert disaster. Historian Alan MacEachern argues the absurd title was the point.

ScienceDaily / The Conversation

A century of watching 70 Ophiuchi finds no planets, and that’s useful

University of Michigan astronomers combined a century of radial-velocity and astrometric data on the nearby binary 70 Oph AB with new Magellan measurements. They found nothing. That null result rules out Jupiter-mass planets across much of the system and shows the stars’ wobbles are stellar activity, but it still leaves room for Earth-sized worlds.

Universe Today

Neutrino flavour could decide whether a big star explodes or just vanishes

Gogilashvili and Tamborra simulated core collapse in 195 stars from 9 to 120 solar masses. Even modest neutrino flavour conversion flipped outcomes from supernova to direct collapse into a black hole, especially between 16 and 30 solar masses. That could explain why we see fewer supernovae than star-formation rates predict.

Universe Today

JPEG XL vs AVIF, now that Firefox decodes both

Firefox 158 turned on JPEG XL by default. Jake Archibald’s careful comparison finds AVIF usually wins for lossy photos and wins by more on screenshots, illustrations and transparency. It also decodes faster. JPEG XL takes lossless and the odd outlier. His advice is to default to AVIF 4:4:4 at high effort and try JPEG XL only when AVIF looks unusually large.

Jake Archibald · Firefox 158 notes

US Championship: Wesley So alone in front after turning round a worse position

So outplayed Ray Robson from behind in round 7 and leads on 5/7. He is the only unbeaten player. Caruana and Woodward are half a point back, and So–Woodward is round 8’s key game. Aronian got his first win. In the women’s event Rachael Li and Alice Lee lead on 5.5, with Irina Krush half a point behind after beating Carissa Yip. Four rounds remain, finishing 22 October.

Chess.com

Kris Bowers is scoring Disney Animation’s Hexed

Bowers, composer of The Wild Robot, is scoring Disney’s November animated feature from Fawn Veerasunthorn and Jason Hand. In it a teen oddball and her Type-A mum discover that her weirdness is hidden magic. On The Wild Robot evidence, it’s worth a listen.

Film Music Reporter

My Fair Lady has two weeks left; a photo-driven song cycle follows

The Julie Andrews-directed My Fair Lady (John Frost and Opera Australia, 70th-anniversary season) closes at the Joan Sutherland Theatre on 31 October. That same weekend, Two Dogs Theatre Co stages Ryan Scott Oliver’s 35MM: A Musical Exhibition at the Tom Mann Theatre, Surry Hills (31 Oct–1 Nov). It is a five-voice song cycle where each song grows out of a photograph, recommended for ages 13+.

Dance Australia · BroadwayWorld · 35MM tickets

Week ahead: Tame Impala ×3 at Olympic Park, Tonga v Lebanon at Parramatta

Tame Impala plays Afterpay Arena Monday to Wednesday (19–21 Oct, finishing around 10:55pm), with Olympic Park road closures until Thursday. Late-night T4 trackwork runs Mon–Tue and T5 changes Tue–Wed. On Wednesday evening, buses replace L4 light rail for the Parramatta Lanes Festival. The RLWC brings Tonga XIII v Lebanon to CommBank Stadium on Friday 23 Oct, 8:05pm.

Transport for NSW · Austadiums