Quote from: mjosephs on July 13, 2017, 08:12:52 PM

Quote from: Prima Primat on July 13, 2017, 01:31:24 PM

Quote from: playingpoodles on July 13, 2017, 05:11:59 AM

A few pages back on this thread you'll see MTP was exposed as fundamentally not memory hard by disgruntled a miner developer who complained of inexplicable code changes

I think you misunderstood something there, too. mjosephs was frustrated about the existence of the time-memory-tradeoff attack vector in the first place,

I think you misunderstood something there. The existence of the time-memory tradeoff attack in no way frustrates me; as a matter of fact reading the Dinur+Nadler paper was quite an enjoyable experience.

Quote from: Prima Primat on July 13, 2017, 01:31:24 PM

I should point out to you that literally nothing you do in computing is 'fundamentally memory hard'. You can always exchange memory usage for CPU time (because whatever you save in memory, you could also just re-calculate whenever you need it again). That's one of the basics of computer science.

This is incorrect; you are confused about what "memory-hard" means. The definition is given on page 3 of Stronger Key Derivation Via Sequential Memory-Hard Functions by Colin Percival:

Quote

Definition 1. A memory-hard algorithm on a Random Access Machine is an algorithm which uses S(n) space and T(n) operations, where S(n) ∈ Ω(T(n)^1−𝜀).

There are plenty of functions in this class. The fact that you can "exchange memory usage for CPU time" does not mean a function is not memory-hard.

I was replying to playingpoodles, and I was referring to this mythical 'fundamental' memory-hardness (as I think I've highlighted enough), rather than the term 'memory-hard' itself I'm not confused about that (as you would've realized if you had read 3 more lines, where I gave that exact definition in layman's terms).
The point I was making is that whether or not something, especially a more complex algo like MTP, is memory-hard in practice can obviously depend on all sorts of details of the algorithm. And once such details have been spotted and fixed, I can't see how it would not be 'fundamentally' memory-hard. Can you?