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Jane Street’s silicon-layout puzzle had a distinctly hands-on answer: the chip is a hardware checker for an 11-by-11 Star Battle puzzle, the firm says. Entrants reverse-engineered the open-source design using tools including KLayout, Yosys and Z3, alongside custom Python and C++ code.
Why it mattersThat is a neat meeting of chip design and puzzle-solving, with a useful reminder that a silicon layout can reveal what a circuit does if you can work back from its structure.
Discuss: Would you rather solve the puzzle in software, or build a tiny chip to check the answer?
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