It's pretty interesting how close this assignment looks to demoscene [1] golf [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf

It even uses Chrome tracing tools for profiling, which is pretty cool: https://github.com/anthropics/original_performance_takehome/...

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wiz21c 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was in the demoscene long ago and that kind of optimisation is definitely in the ballpark of what we did: optimize algorithm down to machine code level (and additionally, cheat like hell to make you believe we ran the algorithm for real :-)).

But to be honest, I wonder what algorithm they implement. I have read the code for 2 minutes, and it sound like random forest prediction. Anyone knows what the code does ?

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saagarjha 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s some useless problem like a random tree walk or something like that, the actual algorithm is not particularly important to the problem

	▲	psb217 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I assume it was partly chosen since the problem structure provides some convenient hooks for selectively introducing subtle and less subtle inefficiencies in the baseline algorithm that match common optimization patterns.

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KeplerBoy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

perfetto is pretty widely used for such traces, because building a viewer for your traces is a completely avoidable pain.

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nice_byte 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

it's designed to select for people who can be trusted to manually write ptx :-)