Quote from: genewitch on June 17, 2011, 03:40:24 PM

What about evolving the hardware to do the hashing rather than writing it as straight VHDL?

I had a good idea about using hadoop clusters to run the fitness tests for the evolutionary algorithm testing.

Could you expand more on this idea? Not all applications are suited for evolutionary approaches, and my guess is that hashing algorithms are definitely not one of them.

Quote from: genewitch on June 17, 2011, 03:40:24 PM

For those who have no clue what i am talking about, read the article about the professors that got an fpga to recognize the difference between two tones with way less than 100 gates and no CLK.

http://fsweb.olin.edu/~mchang/research/documents/seminar/evolve2k2/evolve.ppt
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/adrianth/ade.html

That kind of application is well suited to evolutionary approaches.

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I always had a thought that evolving the circuits would be a way to find really fast ways of "cracking" various hashing algorithms, as well as making really tiny encoders and decoders for various projects.

There's not supposed to be any smooth gradients in a cryptographically secure hash, so I don't see how any evolution-based approach could work for cracking them. What exactly do you have in mind?