ai-village-capture-the-flag-defcon31

[glass bay]

but understandable

[boreal spear]

what about the percentage of granny🤔

[minor falcon]

it was not a hint, like the stuff on granny 3, but well.. we are suppose to stay vague on what we say

[glass bay]

although honestly i got REALLY lucky on inversion

[outer sundial]

It obviously doesn't trigger between 93 to 5 percent

[glass bay]

but like lucky as in i spent way less time brute forcing

[outer sundial]

My brute force give only 60% answer

[amber totem]

i wanted to try bruteforce all ouija table to the static but i takes 1000 years lmao

[gaunt anchor]

In inversion I already found a way to solve and I think i am stuck in the same way I was stuck in cluster3 , have key but lost the door 🙂

[glass bay]

but i guess the same can be said on my approach on sloth and semantle1

but good guessing is still a solution so who cares

[jagged sluice]

read the code, that wont work

[jagged sluice]

install new door ezpz

[minor falcon]

i dont think brut force is coming at play any were in the comp, so agree with you

[jagged sluice]

brute force gaming

[glass bay]

better off deleting that one

imo

[amber totem]

bruteforce is 50% of solution when it works

[jagged sluice]

60% of the time it works every time

[amber totem]

relatable

[minor falcon]

good luck to brutforce cifar

[glass bay]

n^400 submissions lets gooooooooo

[jagged sluice]

leaked solution to granny:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1113104637017460816/1162774925971562650/image.png?ex=653d2989&is=652ab489&hm=d91a8db8810c30be503889dfbf4f63ad69a997956cd15bff9fa2fec44f5bec9f&

[outer sundial]

THIS IS NOT THE ANSWER, YOU ARE LOOKING FOR

[final path]

i suppose im the second one who did inversion, its tricky, but absolutely doable. dead stuck on granny though i think i know what is needed :/

[jagged sluice]

NO THIS IS THE ONE

[minor falcon]

this should make the trick

[jagged sluice]

inb4 someone submits a pumpkin

[wanton patrol]

wait, Granny Smith is not a pumpkin variety? 😮

[minor falcon]

i'm wondering if the organiser are saving all the images / prompts sent to the servers

there is probably a nice best of to do

[glass bay]

well they better be liking the entirety of RoR2 ost sent to hush

[wanton patrol]

or me reading the challenge prompt...

(I actually don't remember if I sent it, was just testing some things out 😅 )

[minor falcon]

i sent all kind of foul names to the api for the pickle challenge

[jagged sluice]

surely moo has a storinator running for this right? surely

[jagged sluice]

one of my first attempts at passphrase was poo poo head, get on my level

[glass bay]

i just want to know how much did llms broke behind the scene when the flag was given

[boreal spear]

one of my first attempts at semantle 2 is attention is all you need, sounds reasonable

[empty bane]

inversion hint?

[glass bay]

the deleted message

[empty bane]

cant believe i missed it rip

[wind ether]

I doubt they store everything, the flags encode the submitted solution so really no need

[minor falcon]

you did not miss anything, was something you probably already noticed too

and that anybody spending more than 5min on the challenge has noticed

[devout jasper]

didn't miss much, I'm still confused so don't worry

[empty bane]

[manic saddle]

any advice for pickle?

[empty bane]

don't give up

[boreal spear]

give up

[wind ether]

Be more dangerous

[outer sundial]

read about pickle: a relish consisting of vegetables or fruit preserved in vinegar or brine.

[manic saddle]

been more dangerous and even more 😂

[glass bay]

real pickle advice: reread the authors' prompt

[outer sundial]

Any advice for inversion and granny

[jagged sluice]

realer pickle advice: try deep frying it

[minor falcon]

reread the author prompt

:p

[glass bay]

for real tho: last 10 words of the pickle author prompt mean more that you thing

[outer sundial]

pickle is straight forward

[glass bay]

1. inverse yourself
2. become the apple

[outer sundial]

Instruction unclear, inverted my self and now blood is in my head

[glass bay]

there is supposed to be a long, convoluted helpful inversion hint, yet i decided against it

[jagged sluice]

instructions unclear, i inverted the apple and have become myself

[ornate marsh]

What dip would you recommend with a fried pickle?

[outer sundial]

habanero dip

[jagged sluice]

gotta say aioli goes very well with them

[devout jasper]

can we submit more than one image in inversion?

[minor falcon]

try

[lunar blaze]

I wish there was a trade system where we can trade hints with our points

[half plinth]

Solved granny 1/2!
But got a json not only with a flag, but with a field called "gran_base64" with huuuuuge string. Do I need it for some reason?

[outer sundial]

that's an image i think so no you don't need it.

hmmm 🤔

[half plinth]

Btw guys, if your requests are getting back with 502, try tenacity lib.

[final path]

https://github.com/jd/tenacity is this somehow related to passphrase? jk

[olive ledge]

Thanks everyone for pitching in with moderation, I really appreciate it.

[olive ledge]

Easter egg

[amber totem]

my ears are crying with hush i'm definitely not sleeping tonight

[half plinth]

Thank you, should I pickle it?

[tepid zenith]

Broken sauce, everything is hosed!!!

[olive ledge]

Challenges aren’t that deep, though we did consider it. Next year we will nest challenges

[mild shale]

\HI

[random minnow]

i can do lots of funny input, but cannot solved the puzzle

[glass bay]

on my way to uncover an embedding which contains an ascii art which contains a sloth image which contains an encoded binary RCE pickle that undoes my PC upon looking at it

[jagged sluice]

next ctf should have an everything together challenge

that puts every challenge together into one big puzzle

worth 2 flags

[manic saddle]

AWS bill: $8M

[jagged sluice]

when the aws bill is enough to buy aws

[half plinth]

Inception: Part 2

[olive ledge]

Too big to fail

[half plinth]

Here is an idea: convince LLM to output you Challenge 28.

[glass bay]

oh no

hallucinated problem definition

[grave frigate]

Same😭
I guess sleeping isn't that good after all

[outer sundial]

I thought it is enough

[random minnow]

mobile.net is a website

[jagged sluice]

searching for passphrase like

https://tenor.com/view/whack-a-mole-cute-cat-funny-gif-14926253

[minor falcon]

as of now, only granny 3 and hush has not been solved by anybody no ?

[craggy beacon]

0.98+ Granny with timber wolf 2nd is not the solution for granny

[outer sundial]

i know, and now i am more confused

road to 100%

[gaunt anchor]

I've reached 0.99998915x and can't push the image more and no flag

[random minnow]

there is one thing you can do: make a gAAAAABl generator and submit to kaggle. 100 trials per day

[jagged sluice]

funny enough the only thing this would do is get you, your 10000 kaggle accounts, and the poor people who you've stolen flags from disqualified

brute force season

[random minnow]

there is max submission of 100 per day

[outer sundial]

you will need more than 10000 accounts

[jagged sluice]

bruteforcing cell providers to bruteforce kaggle accounts to bruteforce flag submissions season

lmao you would need a couple area codes worth of numbers to pull this off

[random minnow]

in theory, for those flag you have already capture, you can generator multiple string. then maybe you can dechoper the message
(each time you run, the string is different but comes from same input parameters)

[jagged sluice]

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

[glass bay]

after redoing granny3 locally i still dont know what to do

and how to do

like i even have an idea what to change where for the biggest change possible

except that's still going from 0.00060 to 0.00063 locally which is 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴 🥴

[granite goblet]

i wish i was smart enough to solve the mnist one...

[random minnow]

after redoing granny3 locally i still dont know what to do

if you set value (x,y)=100000, then (x+1,y+1) would be smiliar?

[olive ledge]

Relatively

[random minnow]

don't have to search pixel by pixel ... coarse to fine steps?

anyway 768x768 is not alot to search BUT

i have a feeling that one pixel cannot change the probability score ... maybe that is not the solution

[minor falcon]

maybe the image and the class have not been selected completly randomly also 🙂

[glass bay]

well it would work if the picture to class mapping was a convex space without local minima

and i could not find any info that it is

[jagged sluice]

just run a bogosort on the pixels, then bruteforce 256x256x256 rgb permutations for each

boom

ah wait no it would be 255x255x255

[glass bay]

and the thingamabob hinted at by the author's prompt did not consider it convex either

furthermore, i've tried just searching through the possible permutatuons space and it is really hard to do

like its somewhat manageable for one pixel but for the whole image i really dont think so

[dense basin]

ignore the clue in MNIST

[random minnow]

you need something like feature viewer for imagenet

https://salient-imagenet.cs.umd.edu/explore/class_948/feature_1582.html

[fast finch]

ignoring the clue a clue ??

[glass bay]

omw to np.random.randn((256, 2))

[past brook]

Brute force

[random minnow]

" 255x255x255" it would not be 256

[past brook]

Its not like we havnt killed the server on semantle and granny

[random minnow]

you need to overshoot the value, so that the effects will spill over to larger region

if you can create a tennis ball (at the correct location) from one "green" pixel maybe it would work

paper "Understanding the One-Pixel Attack: Propagation Maps and Locality Analysis"

try a smaller ise like 64x64 and 256x256 ... maybe you can discover something

[minor falcon]

Guys dont want to play the annoying but we should not share this here

[glass bay]

true tbh

[olive ledge]

Don’t completely ignore it.

[glass bay]

also i doubt i can save as png a picture whose one pixel is like (123, 9992238984, -1)

[random minnow]

we don't even know if can work ... so i won't call these hints. but anyway, i won't be dicsussing this further, so good luck.

[outer sundial]

Same just pushed my value up to 0.996 no flag till now.

[glass bay]

tnx you too

[jagged sluice]

yall are weak

[outer sundial]

wtf, probably trolling

[random minnow]

oh, now all have been solved except passphrase

[ornate marsh]

easy

[spice hawk]

Seeing this still somehow gives me inner piece 😂

[grave frigate]

Already tried😌

[wind ether]

Did you actually solve?

[amber totem]

@wind ether

[wind ether]

I think I know how to solve granny3--able to match local + server with the one-pixel modified, just not able to find the right pixel yet...

[glass bay]

same here

not a total match but i guess good enough

[glass bay]

still this is the best progress

[wind ether]

Yeah I'm seeing if I can influence 'red-wolf' rather than granny, figure it's a good indicator if I'm actually doing something right vs just noise since the changes are so small

The most annoying thing is having to switch back and forth from 224x224 to 768x768

[severe pasture]

rip people who brute-forced granny1 and 2 🙃

[past brook]

wait has nobody solved passphrase yet??

why the hell im i trying to solve it 💀

[minor falcon]

final boss is passphrase / hush / grany3

[glass bay]

https://tenor.com/view/mujikcboro-seriymujik-gif-24361533

idk i saw my solution being perfect and thought that the task itself is botched and i'll have to wait for fixes next week

[glass bay]

i think it will be hush

[past brook]

hush was easy

i just screamed FLAAAAAAAG into the mic and got it

[glass bay]

passphrase just seems off and granny seems simple in thought hard in execution and hush seems hard conceptually and execution-wise and well it is the only audio data task and (comparing to inversion) you gotta submit an audio that is perfect for whatever it is you are trying to do

[past brook]

key is to say it in an australian accent

[wind ether]

Ugh, just realized that I had my pipeline setup trying to minimize rather than maximize the target class...

[olive ledge]

We're going to make some performance updates to the Granny challenges.

There'll be some additional processing you will need on the client side. I will announce here and on the discussion board when they are complete.

[wind ether]

Will they affect the current model + preprocessing? I feel like I'm very close to Granny3, would hate to have to rework my pipeline

[dense jetty]

so, is it going to be harder or easier? or we will not see changes?
asking because i'm struggling with granny now 😅

[limber flower]

Essentially the images will be passed a base64-encoded string as opposed to arrays in JSON

[olive ledge]

More performant, so technically easier

[limber flower]

~1.5s per request -> .05s per request based on our tests

[wind ether]

Oh gotcha so I'd just need to convert the array to the encoded string?

[limber flower]

Correct, something like this:

def array_to_base64(arr):
    img = Image.fromarray(arr)
    buffered = io.BytesIO()
    img.save(buffered, format="PNG")
    return base64.b64encode(buffered.getvalue()).decode()

It should not affect the challenge function

[wind ether]

Awesome, thanks!

[rocky jacinth]

@olive ledge @limber flower Regarding flag sharing, I assume that those of us who naively submitted the Test flag from the starter notebook's submission.csv, thinking it had been regenerated, won't be automatically disqualified!

[amber totem]

pixelated got me, i'm on barney's hot dog website now

[empty bane]

oh yeah i got there lol

although i cant remember how lol

[unique hamlet]

why won't you change server-side for it to make parsing of JSON by more efficient way? Small C++ worker to pre-process input-json, for example?

[empty bane]

the ujson library is a drop in replacement for json in python and orders of magnitude faster, but im srue this works better for their setup

[jagged sluice]

my power died

can't submit g3

:/

[empty bane]

skill issue

[jagged sluice]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1089673636119584898/1104143544068866189/angry-wojak.gif

[empty bane]

i dont think i can maintain my lb position but i can sleep easy knowing im #2 shitposter

[jagged sluice]

🤝

[minor falcon]

my wife went to bed, i can come back in the action

not going to bed before i solve inversion

[devout jasper]

same 😄

[violet trellis]

I am working on it... and just feels i am near the corner👀

[past brook]

i legit dont understand inversion lmao

[olive ledge]

Make sure you look through resources on the discussions boards

[devout jasper]

on kaggle?

[minor falcon]

its definitly more tricky that last year from what i've seen, you did a good job in spicing up the challenge i think!

[minor falcon]

https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/ai-village-capture-the-flag-defcon31/discussion/446004

[dense jetty]

I see that ctf-starter-aiv notebook is updated, but when I open it I see no changes (version 2/2)
Am I the only one who has this problem?

[minor falcon]

was the text for the IP challenge no ?

[upper merlin]

@dense jetty using this is working for me

[rocky jacinth]

Looks like that to me too

[minor falcon]

WTF

WTFFFFFFFFFFFF

[jagged sluice]

calm down and watch this gif

https://imgur.com/Daoab5M

[amber totem]

aaah everything seems logic rn

https://tenor.com/zbNkZ4lqHj.gif

[random minnow]

{'message': 'Challenge Update: For performance, please submit base64 encoded image bytes now (check the updated starter notebook)'}

you probably want to add that you do not want to save the file as jpg. becuase different jpg reader read and decode jpg file differently (i.e. pixel values are different)

[olive ledge]

Okay. As you've seen, we've pushed the updates and a new notebook. This should make your bruteforcing even easier.

[minor falcon]

out of curiosity, what is the gain in perf in the server side ? you have an idea ?

[olive ledge]

I'll actually make one more update to the notebook to make this more explicit.

An extremely painful lesson

[minor falcon]

a good lesson for everybody manipulating images served via an api i would say !

btw thanks for the time you are putting in this to make the experience enjoyable

[olive ledge]

Thank you.

The painful lesson is running an attack and then accidentally saving your sample out as JPG.

Tell your friends: https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/ai-village-capture-the-flag-defcon31/discussion/446213

[olive ledge]

I can't even make a sandwich without setting off the fire alarm

[jagged sluice]

see you just need ai fire alarm

new ctf

capture moo's fire alarm so he can make sandwich

[dark dune]

goodmorning, can you check DM?

[random minnow]

i have one sggestion for all:

you can make a log like this ... don't forget there is a solution writeup competition

so you can record what you have learns for kaggle 30 days CTF and submit for it

[topaz ember]

After this update no matter which png file I try, except for the default wolf, I get {'message': 'Invalid input.'}. Is it intended?

Just checked, http://granny.advml.com/score still assumes jpg as an input, png doesn't work. Not sure how png wolf passes through though 🙂

[olive ledge]

Looking.

[olive ledge]

i've tried a few images and don't get errors, want to DM me your image/request?

[topaz ember]

Sure.

[olive ledge]

Confirmed the issue - exploring...

We weren't handling RGBA images, we are now explicitly converting images to RGB

[sand solstice]

increased my semantle 2 score by .1 from yesterday but still not feeling any closer

[wind ether]

I think I'm giving up on granny3 for now--pretty sure I found the pixel after generating 10M+ adversarial images locally (or at least the region it's in), but no luck in creating changes with granny prob >= 0.07%. Not sure if to expect a drastic change with the right RGB values...

[glass bay]

Same. 99% certain about the pixel, 90% certain about the color, 0 progress still

[random minnow]

" but no luck in creating changes with granny prob >= 0.07%. " i tough you already sync you local model with the server?

[wind ether]

Yeah it’s the exact same, but even then changing one pixel can’t get better results than 0.0007 for granny prob. Guess there’s something more to it

[glass bay]

^

[random minnow]

how about following paper algorithm instead of brute force?

[glass bay]

Yes, that's what I did, same

Like the algo allows to find the pixel

[wind ether]

Yep that’s my approach haha

It’s probably a different paper/algo that helps to minimize the search space further

[glass bay]

Pixel found, good job, yet still 0.00066...

[random minnow]

i wonder "more than one pixel difference detected" ... how well can we trust this syatment? are we interpreting this statement correctly?

[glass bay]

Now that is a statement that should not be answered in this chat

Also I've booted up the algo to run overnight with very precise parameters - the answer is still the same more or less

[random minnow]

if you are sure that one pixel cannot work, then the probability of other method increases

i suggest explore and exploit

think of something esle?

Collect flags by "evading, poisoning, stealing, and fooling AI/ML"

[glass bay]

Inb4 the answer is to change pixel at [-1, 1] where the admin password is placed

[random minnow]

if we think out of the box, it could be fool the AI that "only one pixel is changed", etc .... of course i can be wrong

anything is possible just keep trying

[glass bay]

Well maybe

I have some thoughts but i don't want to give ideas to people that are higher at LB than me

[random minnow]

it is trial and error

and sometime luck

[glass bay]

Also like pretty sure there is just something like assert over all pixels but one

[random minnow]

but one thing is certain

you need to do brute force at some point of time

[glass bay]

Yes, yet cutting people's time to get to that conclusion is detrimental to me since like num of flags first and time second

Either I'm getting the edge by solving the unsolvables, or by solving fast, and the second is out of the picture for me imo

[outer sundial]

I wake up to these messages.

[glass bay]

same tbh

[random minnow]

i noramlly ignore them

[glass bay]

someone's alt tried to message me too

[random minnow]

i think the moderator can see all DM?

[outer sundial]

no

[glass bay]

like people if we were going to give hints we will give them here lmao

[random minnow]

and it is aginst the rule to DM and discussed

[glass bay]

except we won't

[outer sundial]

No one would, maybe some would.

[random minnow]

so i would either ignore or foward to moderator

so think carefully for those who want to DM me

[outer sundial]

Same

don't dm me

[jagged sluice]

Gotta troll more

I get none of those

Ez

[outer sundial]

https://tenor.com/view/burn-gif-20530397

[jagged sluice]

https://tenor.com/view/bait-fish-this-is-bait-gif-11212449

[mild shale]

have anyone solved cifar

[jagged sluice]

I solved cifar

[outer sundial]

https://tenor.com/view/doubt-press-x-la-noire-meme-x-button-gif-19259237

[jagged sluice]

Shh he doesn’t know the lore

[molten wigeon]

which paper?

[outer sundial]

first paper that comes up while researching about Granny 3

[mild shale]

[errant bloom]

Which mobilenetv2 is used online? tf or torch?

[glass bay]

not an available or shareable information

[mild shale]

it am still wondering what they are calculating like many

[boreal spear]

trolling

[molten wigeon]

"One Pixel Attack for Fooling Deep Neural Networks"? Has anyone managed to get granny even to p=0.1?

[jagged sluice]

There is another

[glass bay]

best i can do is 0.00066524

https://tenor.com/view/honest-word-its-honest-work-it-aint-much-it-aint-much-but-its-honest-work-gif-13763573

[random minnow]

there are many many paper. if one paper don;t work, try two ,,,

[jagged sluice]

There is one good one I am reading rn

But I will not reveal where it came from

[glass bay]

try sending a paper to moohax's address

[jagged sluice]

Nor why it is written on stone tablets

[outer sundial]

because it is ancient paper

[jagged sluice]

It’s got all sorts of weird symbols

And it seems like the vocabulary used is comprised of like 10 letters

A lot of I, V, X, M, C, and L

[molten wigeon]

Submitting the new version (v5) of granny-1: and getting TypeError: Object of type bytes is not JSON serializable. ?

[gaunt anchor]

try json={'data': input_data.decode()} in the request (adding decode)

no it works without decode on kaggle ! (at least what I tried)

in colab I added decode

maybe its related to a lib version or something

[random minnow]

yes. for unknown reason, sometimes you need/or need not to add .decode()

[dark dune]

Have anyone know the input data format on cluster 1 😄 ?

[tepid zenith]

same as it is

[empty bane]

I actually didn't get any of these lol

[boreal spear]

stuck in inversion

[devout jasper]

welcome to the club

[outer sundial]

🙅‍♂️ 👍

[outer sundial]

completed granny ?

[glass bay]

What's more likely, me going 17 flags to 22 by finishing semantle2, granny 1-2, cluster1 and pixelated, or solving hush or granny 3?

[boreal spear]

No, seems inversion is easier

[empty bane]

sus

[glass bay]

I feel I have a higher chance after solving inversion and pickle which a lot of people struggle

[glass bay]

I miscounted and later corrected myself

[outer sundial]

pickle is eassssy

just follow prompt

[boreal spear]

can get 23 flags by finishing granny 1-2 and inversion

[twin wren]

just saw this competition today and every one has already solved 22+ questions....

[glass bay]

Not everyone, like 7 people out of 700+

[boreal spear]

what

22 for 1st place now

[glass bay]

If you put in time and read this chat you'll get 15+ flags in no time

Gl hf

[outer sundial]

I am able to get my local model up to 2 decimals to that of API. And now I realized for the last 4 days how badly I was overcomplicating this problem.

[twin wren]

Sounds fair.

will read all the message since Oct 10

[glass bay]

Since like LLM tasks which are like 10 of them get easy as you learn

And learn as in put more that 2 hours into research

The last 6-7 are the real jawbreakers and headtwisters

[boreal spear]

wow

[twin wren]

The Level doesn't seems to be relevant.

Clsuter leve 2 and 3 are much easier than level 1..

[boreal spear]

place for your model

[glass bay]

Not as in 21 through 27, but last 7 difficulty wise, which seem to be count cifar, granny 3, hush, pixelated, inversion, pickle and semantle 2 in around that order from hardest to easiest

[boreal spear]

granny 1-2 easier than inversion?

[glass bay]

well, you can at least google granny 1-2

imo count mnist is top 2 because i hate "guess authors' thinking process" challenges

[wanton patrol]

I love that I have solved at least one from that list and found it pretty straightforward 😄
my private badge of honour

[past brook]

hmm i got semantle 2 in no time,but have no clue what to do on the rest you listed

i guess difficulty is relative

also mnist is the most difficult one for sure i dont care

[empty bane]

Don't forget passphrase right?

[past brook]

ill never solve it

[empty bane]

Or have people solved that one now

[manic saddle]

I followed the prompt and im still in pickle 🥲how much more dangerous can i be

[wanton patrol]

this is the key 😛 that is also why I don't like people discussing "obvious stuff"

[glass bay]

solved 3 of them i'm just lazy to do semantle2 and lazy to catch up by solving other stuff

[glass bay]

yes and this

did anyone actually solve passphrase?

[boreal spear]

So that's why I opine pickle is boring

[past brook]

100% agree.. i hate to say it but ive gotten some really useful hints from this chat that were supposedly "obvious"

that i would have taken me a long time to figure out myself

[glass bay]

+1 on why i recommend reading through this chat lmao

[wanton patrol]

at least there are some that are "red herring" level as well, for balance -- because I don't have the prerequisites to understand the supposed hint 🤷

aka there are some that you would get when you are "already there", in which case they are obvious

[glass bay]

^

[outer sundial]

Best hint is Jenny’s phone number in pixelated

[wanton patrol]

😄

[glass bay]

the best hint would be count mnist/count cifar prompt rewrite

[boreal spear]

simple

[glass bay]

nothing simple can fill up (256, 2) shape

[outer sundial]

It is simple

[wanton patrol]

I should have saved the old notebook version...or wait, I must have 🤔

[boreal spear]

though I solved mnist in 5 mins and didn't waste 1 min on cifar

[glass bay]

it feels like a guessing game, guessing correctly is trivial obviously

what if its a cultural reference or what not

like a 42 reference i can get behind

[gaunt anchor]

mnist once I solved , its really a count problem 😅

[empty bane]

simple counting problem for CIFAR

and 99 other practical jokes

[glass bay]

the answer is actually simple, just use input_data to make a linear regression model

[twin wren]

I dont see how its relating to AI security

[glass bay]

joke attempt failed

[dark dune]

Do you pass cluster 1 then I can pass cluster 2? I found the flag on cluster 2

[boreal spear]

2->3->1

[dark dune]

I submitted, score is still 1

[twin wren]

This compeition is more like "gaussing author's mind"

[outer sundial]

https://tenor.com/view/hackerman-gif-22344136

[tepid zenith]

https://tenor.com/view/mesemoa-nichan-ani-funny-number1-gif-13699404

[glass bay]

pov: you are solving sloth

[minor falcon]

I got one like this also yesterday

[dark dune]

ConnectionError: HTTPConnectionPool(host='test.advml.com', port=80): Max retries exceeded with url: /score (Caused by NewConnectionError('<urllib3.connection.HTTPConnection object at 0x7d0dd7a3c250>: Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno -3] Temporary failure in name resolution'))

help me

[minor falcon]

I solved it finally yesterday. When I think about aaaaaall the time I spent on it it 😭

[outer sundial]

It has the most useful prompt out of all the challenges.

[grave frigate]

Is dictionary the correct format? If that's not an hint

[outer sundial]

be more dangerous

[minor falcon]

i still dont get the prompt connexion tbh, probably my level of english in not good enough to understand the subtility

[grave frigate]

🥲🥲

I understood the clue but
The format of input data has been buzzing me

[boreal spear]

imo prompt for pixelated is good, not the case for pickle

[minor falcon]

yeah the pixelated was super good

[twin wren]

I dont understand pickle

[minor falcon]

well only advice to give is: don't give up, try stuff, you'll eventually find the solution (if I did, everybody can)

[twin wren]

The model actually receive base64 as input, and it may give us the flag under some modified base64?

[minor falcon]

advice two, that is worth for many of the challenges: don't overthink them. Otherthinking is the best way to get stuck in a dead end

this image is a good metaphore for the CTF so far for me

(if you don't know it, there is somethink obvious in the image that you won't see until you see it)

[sand solstice]

spent way too much time on cluster3, but I’m back in T100

going to set a bruteforce loop then go to sleep

[gaunt anchor]

bruteforce for ?

[dark dune]

why not competition submission ?

[sand solstice]

dont think i can say much more but i have solved a few that way and its easy to do when stuck

[glass bay]

but cluster 3

there's a dictionary with very specific values you need to send

like i guess you partially decoded some of it then maybe

[sand solstice]

yeah solved that one, im talking about the next one

sorry if unclear

[glass bay]

the count mnist one?

good luck

[sand solstice]

did that one too

not cifar yet

seems to be the trickier one all around

[median mauve]

seems I am bad at counting 🤯

[gaunt anchor]

count it's either you see it or not , once you see it then its will be solved ... till then you have to think think think

I guess cifar same thing

[sand solstice]

yeah you have to pattern match, so there was a snap of insight for mnist

cifar i had two hunches which were both wrong

[median mauve]

I thought I saw it, but seems not

[gaunt anchor]

it took me couple of days till I saw it 🙂

[sand solstice]

sigh i hope im on track for that

the numbers, what do they mean? lol

[rocky jacinth]

You have the Test flag in the same submission.csv file?

[minor falcon]

the new respond time for grany is fire

[twin wren]

Sometimes i do not understand the flag condition

Like Granny 1, what exactly do i need to do?

get high score on timber wolf?

[minor falcon]

you need to guess what you need to do, we cannot help on that. But it should be pretty obvious. If you are stuck, check the competitions writings from last year competition, some are useful
https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/ai-village-capture-the-flag-defcon31/discussion/446004

[twin wren]

How is guessing author's mind related to Machine Learning..

[wanton patrol]

it is related to hacking 🙂

hacking without social engineering is just computer science

f.e. it is possible that competition hosts will reveal more hints than they expected if we keep harassing them for hints 😄

[minor falcon]

honnestly there is no needs for hints here

and that's from someone that never did CTF challenges before

[wanton patrol]

I would be totally fine without hints, but at least public sharing is "fair to everyone", and also might balance out some private sharing that might be going on 😛

[tawdry totem]

Cifar,inversion,passphrase are solvable, which one is easier? No idea for any of these 😖

[minor falcon]

i dont think there is private sharing either, the people competing for the medals are not stupid enough to trade info and risk a ban

[glass bay]

inversion was solved by at least 2 people

[minor falcon]

inversion has been solved by multiple persons already, i guess it is the easier

[glass bay]

cifar and passphrase i believe not

[minor falcon]

cifar i have a pretty good idea about where to go, but I miss a key to fully understand the clue I think

[boreal spear]

inversion, can’t trigger something

[minor falcon]

all my obvious tests have also failed, I'm going for something more sofisticated now

[glass bay]

i would say something about that but that would be a massive hint so i'll just say INVERSE

[boreal spear]

Imo cifar is not doable coz for a whole week no one claimed

[glass bay]

^

[minor falcon]

cifar is as duable as pickle i think

[glass bay]

cifar hint on a halfway through the month?

[lunar blaze]

I have no idea how but pickle was the easiest one for me among others

[minor falcon]

I wish there will be no hint for cifar

[glass bay]

pickle is something you get feedback from

[ornate marsh]

this gives me hope 😄

[minor falcon]

that would give an unfair advantage to people that didnt spend time on it

i decided to invest a lot of my time to try to understand the clue and I gathered some pieces together, if you give an extra bit of information to people that didnt even look at it yet, they will go much faster as they might have invest time in solving other challenges

[glass bay]

that'd be skill issue, no accounting for social engeneering and other people bragging

[minor falcon]

its also strategical, some might decide to invest time in granny3/hush while other decide to invest time in CIFAR. If you give a hint for CIFAR, you give a hedge to people who strategically decided to go first for granny/hush

but that work the other way around too:
if someone invest a lot of time in cracking passphrase, if the org is giving an hint for it, it will advantage me because other them as i didnt spent much time on it yet

and if nobody manage to succeed in a task its not a big deal at the end, so for me better to leave things as they are 🙂

[glass bay]

investing time into something that was shown as barely solvable is a strategy, but the most sure strategy is to balance it with 'solve the most of solvables'

[minor falcon]

something might not look solvable for you but very duable for me

[glass bay]

obviously its relative

otherwise the top5 would be 24/27

[minor falcon]

ex: pickle for which I spent most of my time in the previous 3 days while being obvious for many of us 😅

[glass bay]

wouldn't say that about pickle

but mnist 100%

[outer sundial]

I am so done with granny, time to shift my focus to other problems.

[glass bay]

since i got the flag relatively quickly and still spent a lot of time and i think it was deserved

[outer sundial]

Took me 5 min for pickle.

[glass bay]

[minor falcon]

if i have to rank the time spent by tasks for me i'd say:

1. Pickle
2. CIFAR
3. Granny 1/2
4. Inversion
5. passphrase
6. MNIST
7. Cluster 1

now it term of priority i'll be probably

1. granny 3
2. inversion
3. cifar

Keeping hush and passphrase for the end 😱

talking of granny3, i finally got my script debbuged, time to make a trial!

[glass bay]

from what i've gathered, granny3 seems unbeatable

i've memorized the exact optimal pixel and its value from local testing and no improvement happened

well, ok, not 0, in the 0.00066xxx digits

[minor falcon]

i'll give it a shot with my methodology, we'll see if i can beat the 0.00066 baseline

[empty bane]

same results here

[minor falcon]

i'm looking forward for the end of the comp to see the methodologies used by each

[glass bay]

wait till you see my sloth methodology

if i get to top5 that is

like 0.00066% that that happens but maybe

having tried hush, i'm sure its the most doable yet extremely hard and precise

out of the big unsolved 4

[minor falcon]

i'll try to get first inversion and we'll see

[devout jasper]

it's driving me nuts

[glass bay]

it is interesting if there is any lore/connection between the flag tasks

[wanton patrol]

for me it is pixelated that was relatively simple and fun 😛

I think for me the problems where the server itself gives more feedback are the best, so you feel that it is getting warmer and warmer
the opposite being the binary - you either solve it or not

[boreal spear]

hard to recognize

😵‍💫

[thorn quarry]

Does the sentence of 5 words in semantle2 has any meaning? Or is it just a random words ?

[lone bough]

#ai-village-capture-the-flag-defcon31 message

[grave frigate]

Any hint for pickle? In the chat

[minor falcon]

i got a 0.00067

[glass bay]

oh wow cool

i believi i would've also if my local model was closer or if i chose a different algo

still like that's nowhere near 0.51+

[glass bay]

authors' prompt is more useful than you think

[random minnow]

"Does the sentence of 5 words in semantle2 has any meaning? Or is it just a random words ?"
you should have think:
if it is random word: what can i do (to speedup my search)?
if it isn't : what can i do (to speedup my search)?

just think, assume , do and observed results --> rethink, reassume,redo -->

[amber sage]

cannot have inversion's output give 0.9+ at index 4, 5, 7. tried black/white inversion, left/right flip, and top/down flip for letters. I'm losing hope...

[random minnow]

solved sloth!

[glass bay]

gj

[grave frigate]

Is the format of the input correct?

🥲🥲

[glass bay]

for pickle? yes, but the correct format is bitstring (that goes to the server) aka not only dictionary

basically everything pickleable

[outer ingot]

Which bg color we need to use for pixelated black or white?

[final path]

try and see which works better

[grave frigate]

Thanks
I'll work with this

[random minnow]

whether human or model, the learning process is the same:
if it is fully supervsied, it learn only yes, no
if it is exploartory, it may learn beyond yes,no, i.e. learn something else

[wanton patrol]

if only we knew better ways to teach AI to explore 😛

[random minnow]

just watch latest prof Geoffrey Hinton interview on chatgpt4. he believed tha chatgpt understand the conetxt to some extend

this reminds me of genuis and hardworker

i think chatgpt is hardworker

[wanton patrol]

I recently finally watched a spring one where he was pretty doomerist about AI safety
maybe he has learned more in the meanwhile

[random minnow]

i think it also proves that part of intelliegence (though not all) is about memorising/experience/predict max probability

exploration is generative

[wanton patrol]

there is currently an Abstract Reasoning Challenge going on as well (the same corpus by Francois Chollet which a Kaggle competition was based on a couple of years ago), but I dropped it when I started with this one 😄

[random minnow]

i think we now can teach ai to expand his toughts (i.e. good imaginative) , what lacking is what is next? how to decide if the imagination is good or bad or how to use it

[wanton patrol]

https://lab42.global/arcathon/
this one -- unfortunately I discovered it late, this year's one will only run till December

[dense jetty]

finally, I solved granny1 🐺 🍏

[random minnow]

you can google for chatgpt + ARCathon . i think some interesting progress?

[wanton patrol]

I think it was still pretty far, but there are obvious encoding/representation issues

ARC is pretty far from what ChatGPT was trained on representation wise

so we are probably not even close to the limit of this technique

[naive umbra]

Cluster3 was fun!

[tepid zenith]

what is thie HUSH about, any idea about the output that it generates?

[boreal spear]

idk but a blank wav file can't pass🤣

[tepid zenith]

brute forcing spotify

maybe it enjoys a song and breaks the silence

[amber totem]

I think I know what to do on hush but skill issue

[lunar blaze]

I whispered to hush but no luck 😄

I hope it's not logged.. 😄

[tepid zenith]

don't even know what are these probabilities

https://www.wordfrequency.info/samples.asp is this the secret sauce

[random minnow]

expensive and not worth

[waxen lynx]

0.000679 in Granny3 😅

[violet trellis]

Still crying from Pickle...
only 2 points to reach 20s

[lunar blaze]

got the mnist finally..... simple counting

literally

[timid steppe]

In the pickle challenge, does the input data is the clue or it's just a random sample?

[minor falcon]

i had to restart mine because of a bug, lets see who get the 0.001 first ! 😀

[timid steppe]

I'm getting crazy about that pickle when seeing people keep saying reread the prompt 😦

[dark dune]

I had solved Cluster 2, https://www.kaggle.com/code/dangnguyen97/2-scores-test-cluster-level-2-solve , I think it will help starters. If you don't mind, you can give me 1 vote. Thank you ^^

[grave frigate]

F😂😂😂😂

[outer sundial]

great

[minor falcon]

you should not share notebook @dark dune it is not allowed in this competition

[empty bane]

Welcome to the club :)

[grave frigate]

This much hardwork for an upvote😂😂😂

[minor falcon]

how far are you anokas in granny 3 ?

[empty bane]

Not very far despite a very large amount of work

[dark dune]

sorry, I changed it is private : (

[minor falcon]

no notebook medals grinding for this comp sorry !

we should make a separate leaderboard for the best score achieved in granny 3

[wanton patrol]

which definition of "best" are you using? 😛

[wind ether]

0.0006927 here but I think that's the max with my current method

[random minnow]

"Not very far despite a very large amount of work"
keep going. !!!

[minor falcon]

i'm curious to see who will be the first one cracking a 23rd flag

[pliant quail]

How do you guys import MNIST? if it's a simple counting problem, I am afraid anything wrong with my data 😅

[empty bane]

Can't give any hints sorry

[minor falcon]

nothing to do with, but are you guys using more gpt or google to research/get familiarize with a subject ?

i figured gpt to be a very powerfull tool to think out loud, I use it as my personnal duck

[random minnow]

"I am afraid anything wrong with my data"
write say 5 different codes, try say 5 different data source.
if all results are the same, probability of bug reduces

[tepid zenith]

i got list of 2 from list of 12 in Hush output. what to do with this information, i have no idea

[outer sundial]

Either you get 12 or 2

[tepid zenith]

i also got 9

[minor falcon]

i got a list of 6542 👀

ah no nevermind, that list is the amount of stuff i tried for pickle, i forgot

[boreal spear]

means you are using my blank wav file

[tepid zenith]

you solved it?

[minor falcon]

is it considered being productive to stare at this ?

[outer sundial]

No

[exotic flame]

for authors' prompt you mean the initial description or the reply message ?

[outer sundial]

If each epoch is taking 10 mins then yes it looks productive to stare at it.

[glass bay]

yes

[glass bay]

watch Depeche Mode - Enjoy The Silence clear the flag

[glass bay]

ok, reread the last sentence of the prompt

[minor falcon]

updating my spotify list

[wanton patrol]

now that is some lateral thinking 😛

[random minnow]

i didn't says one

[manic saddle]

Im being dangerous tho

[glass bay]

welp now upload pic with 2 px changed

oh wait i actually wanted to be helpful i forgot that pickle's description has 1 sentence total lmao

[wanton patrol]

I thought you were trolling 😄

[minor falcon]

I think we overthink.
What is the lowest of all changes ? 0

What we need to do here is just submit the original picture
:smart:

[glass bay]

accidental god level trolling

[glass bay]

the lowest of changes is not submitting the pic, the internal state of the model and server stays the same

[minor falcon]

now that we can submit encoded string for granny*, I'm going to submit a pickle saying "this is not the wolf you are looking for"

[glass bay]

idk my first few were zip-bombs

a bit too dangerous

[random minnow]

i change my stragtegy a bit: instead of study the problem, i now turn attention to the person who create the problem

[minor falcon]

attention is all you need

[glass bay]

you can also become the problem

[cloud prawn]

cluster1 question. Maybe it's part of the problem, but are we supposed to send the index locations or the id values? I intially wored on it assuming it was one but now thinking it might be the other.... 🤔

[minor falcon]

its part of the problem

[random minnow]

"index locations or the id values?"
maybe you should ask,
if i submit id, what will be the message?
if i submit index, waht will be the message?
if i submit invalid values, waht will be the message?

oops just realise that this is label as simple and yet i cannot solved it 😢

[amber totem]

being stuck with pixelated and pickle even tho i know when i'll get the flag i'll feel stupid

https://tenor.com/bVEfA.gif

[minor falcon]

i'm moving on inversion finally

[empty bane]

me rn

[boreal spear]

solved?

[minor falcon]

no not yet, but i might have the right approach now.

at least partially

[wind ether]

Which one did you solve last night? Assumed it was inversion

[minor falcon]

was pickle i solved last night 😅

[boreal spear]

help me with granny:)

[wind ether]

Oh hahah congrats!

[minor falcon]

desperation has been my best friend for that one

in my side i'm missing inversion (wip) / hush (didnt start looking) / granny 3 (wip, but not confident) / pass code / CIFAR (for which I hope desperation will do same as for pickle)

[wind ether]

Same here, the big barrier is going to be 24 once cifar/inversion are solved

[minor falcon]

i think cifar might be one of the tie breaker

[random minnow]

this defcon is eating too much of my time. i still other interesting ckaggle competition i want to take part

[jagged sluice]

Ok which one of you on the leaderboard changed their name to gullible

[wind ether]

Yep, I honestly think the first person to 24 (maybe 25 if passphrase can be solved) will win

[boreal spear]

really

3 weeks left

[minor falcon]

i'm happy for once there is a competition that does not requiere infinite computer ressources and XXL GPU :p

and that is not pure lotery

[glass bay]

ahem ahem neurips2023 ahem

[minor falcon]

optiver 👀

[glass bay]

at least optiver haven't had a statistical research of its leaderboard in discussions

[empty bane]

Same as me haha

[minor falcon]

wdym ?

making progresses on your side ?

[random minnow]

"i'm happy for once there is a competition that does not requiere infinite computer ressources and XXL GPU :p"
this competition requires infinte brain power

[minor falcon]

great for once my brain is fully available since i'm in between two jobs 😂

[boreal spear]

looks like you guys have unlimited energy participating 2 comps at same time

[orchid oriole]

TIL about the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I "comeback" and I am not happy about it

[lunar blaze]

I am waiting for my results on Bengali tonight.. 🔥 buckled up for the shake up

[minor falcon]

well ranked there ?

[pliant quail]

Solved MNIST. It is ...... surprising.......

btw, i indeed used wrong dataset

[boreal spear]

are there different mnists?

[pliant quail]

i won't tell you i used mnist offered by kaggle 😅

[boreal spear]

i used that, solved in 5 mins

[thorn quarry]

In the cluster one challenge, I gave the subpopulation, I thought when 's' will be equal to zero I would get flag but I didn't. I don't know why? I'm stuck in this for 4 days straight this is my first ctf.. anything wrong from myside

[fallow cargo]

Do I have to be a Star wars fan to solve pickle???😔

[jagged sluice]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[thorn quarry]

I didn't understand

[jagged sluice]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[thorn quarry]

Is it a clue?

[jagged sluice]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[boreal spear]

you can use default query and check what s represents

[lunar blaze]

.

[boreal spear]

lol

[lunar blaze]

😄

[jagged sluice]

I should probably work on challenges instead of shitposting

[thorn quarry]

Didn't know seniors would welcome me this good😂

[jagged sluice]

But where’s the fun in that?

[boreal spear]

you can share your granny solutions and continue talking shit

[minor falcon]

actually chinmaya, this competition is an introspection, we are not allowed to share details of solving problems

but we can shitpost

and since its the thing we can do the best...

[jagged sluice]

Granny? Who is granny

[cloud prawn]

Can you link to the dataset? Asking for a friend....

[jagged sluice]

^

[thorn quarry]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[jagged sluice]

There we go

That’s the spirit

[final path]

I think this comp is way too long, spending 1 month constantly thinking about cifar can drive anyone mad 😄

[jagged sluice]

Come join the shitpost squad

[random minnow]

@thorn quarry "{'message': 'Too small! groups of <1% dataset size are not representative. Score: 0'}"
in'st this also zero? what amkes you think correct solution is s=0?

[boreal spear]

you didn't solve cluster 1?

[cloud prawn]

morning feelings these days

[thorn quarry]

s was giving different values for different subpopulations, I thought it would give flag if it reaches 0. I forgot it had zero in the start. Aaahh what is this s then 😪😪

[tepid zenith]

when 🍎 changes color, a 🍏 will appear which 👵 loves and 🐺 fears

https://tenor.com/view/wolf-kiss-gif-14874188

That’s how much he fears

[olive ledge]

Stream it - i'd watch that

[cloud prawn]

I would, but it would be public sharing and I don't want to get disqualified 😄

[tepid zenith]

What all you’re left to find 😅

[olive ledge]

That was a test.

...

[cloud prawn]

I don't think I can list them all here, due to the discord message character length.

• cluster1, mnist, cifar, grannies, passphrase (although I managed to get what I was trying to do, buts not the solution), hush, witf3, pickle.

[boreal spear]

you solved inversion??

[tepid zenith]

Interesting, solved pixelated and inversion 🎉

[lunar blaze]

I solved the witf3 from a random tweet I saw the other day..

[boreal spear]

help me

[cloud prawn]

Yea, skipped some of the easy ones to come back to, but now coming back to them and finding out they aren't as easy as I thought :/

[tepid zenith]

I personally battled a lot with cluster1, supposedly easy for lot of folks here

[manic saddle]

Yeah i did cluster 1 but not 3 yet, have all the pieces tho

[grave frigate]

In cluster 1, Is the model given with the data useful?

[abstract rose]

Is that expected to get <Response [403]> on pickle?

[amber totem]

mean that your are temp banned, you need sleep

[abstract rose]

ok

[amber totem]

1 mn if sufficient

[abstract rose]

1min between each query ? or 1min between each 1000 query?

[pliant quail]

So the phone number in pixelate is a real hint or not 🥲

I remembered that when i first started it, I called this number several times hhahah

[manic saddle]

Imagine if it was moos number

[random minnow]

"Yea, skipped some of the easy ones to come back to, but now coming back to them and finding out they aren't as easy as I thought :/"
... if there were a next competition i will start with the ones that uses brute force (no one fight with me for traffic)

[amber totem]

you may separate each query by 0.5s or 1s i don't really know, and if you get 403 or 502 or something like that sleep for 1 minutes may be good

[outer sundial]

its jenny number

[pliant quail]

I got it. I got it. I got it.

[manic saddle]

yes

[amber totem]

you are trying hard making us going to the right direction without giving hint or anything but i can't get it and i tried so much things i can't get the right intuition

[manic saddle]

nah he is not lol

[outer sundial]

But nowadays jenny has opened a hot dog shop, the clue is in hot dogs. you need to order it.

[manic saddle]

chilling with hot dogs, jenny and sloth

[pliant quail]

I feel frustrated every day🥲 It's the game for those who have tons of time

[outer sundial]

For me it is granny.

[timid steppe]

Is there any way that we can play the last year competition at the moment? I want to take some "easy" challenge and feel the joy of getting the flag again 😦

[final path]

yeah, thas how I came up with with half of my ~100 ideas I tried 😄

[final path]

you can make chatGPT to play WTF with you 😄

[unique hamlet]

that's cheating because you can send more than 1 message in 1 dialog; it doesn't forget your previous speach🙂

too easy!

[final path]

ok I did it

[cursive cobalt]

is the IPV6 address. getting used in IP addess challenges? I have tried many prompts, just can;t seem to get ouput other than this.

{'message': 'To send an email to [e-mail], you should use the IPV6 address 70bd:97d2:b64d:c56:2f87:5084:63b8:ee72.'}🙁

[tepid zenith]

Thank you for email.

Cheers,
Joe

[amber totem]

i'm really far from jenny's hot dogs

[tepid zenith]

Is this a hint?

[minor falcon]

depends, is there pickles in the hot dogs ?

[pliant quail]

btw what's the meme in hot dogs? though I guess it was the last year problem?

[tepid zenith]

https://tenor.com/view/dog-hotdog-cute-gif-26578918

[olive ledge]

It’s not a hint.

[timid steppe]

Pickle solved, now I can sleep in peace without the voice of ObiWan

[past brook]

im falling behind big time

havnt gotten a flag in like 2 days

[minor falcon]

had the same, and yesterday got 3 in the same day

[past brook]

all I can think about at work is flags

im counting mnist in my sleep

[amber totem]

got semantle 2 yesterday but now i feel like every challenge will be extremely painful haha

[pliant quail]

Solved Pixelated. Really fun. But i HATE OCR

[tepid zenith]

How have people solved granny? Brute forcing? Green iPhone is not working, neither Steve jobs nor even keeping doctor in the corner so that Apple comes closer

[tepid zenith]

I also hate OCR. Please give me flag

[pliant quail]

🏳️‍🌈

[nimble matrix]

Is pickle a LLM problem?

[glass bay]

noone will tell you that here

why do people ask before doing a problem for at least 10 mins

[nimble matrix]

Doing the pickle for the last 2 days

[wanton patrol]

Joining the club of 1000s of people who have done that...

[glass bay]

i'm so sorry that you had to go through that. probably you should experiment and do something you've never thought would work

or give another problem a try

[nimble matrix]

would probably try another one give this one a break

[minor falcon]

Why people ask before doing a problem for at least 3 days*

its missing a troll emoji here

[empty bane]

definitely switch between them if you're stuck

[exotic flame]

cifar10 or 100 ?🤔

[empty bane]

https://tenor.com/view/no-clues-no-clues-tim-de-la-ghetto-the-code-lol-network-no-hints-gif-19096473

[unique hedge]

stuck in mnist...

[olive ledge]

I believe it you!

[unique hedge]

Thank you🥹

[empty bane]

https://tenor.com/view/monkey-gif-18890916

status after 4 days of inversion

[ornate marsh]

https://tenor.com/view/wilson-lonely-alone-ocean-sad-gif-16743507

Pickle! PICKLE!

[amber totem]

https://tenor.com/blOcJ.gif

[final path]

granny drives me insane..

[outer sundial]

https://tenor.com/view/crazy-insane-stewie-family-guy-finals-gif-5655336

Me after trying to solve granny for last 5 days

[tepid zenith]

What score you have reached in your quest

[olive ledge]

I might suggest taking a break and doing a good review of last years challenges. There's also a great video from Rob Mulla that I found recently covering some of last years challenges. He has some great anecdotes and ways he frames the problems. : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNqtaMyw8c4

[outer sundial]

Not able to replicate the Api model locally.

[outer sundial]

Went through twice Skill issue.

[tepid zenith]

Highly recommended to myself 👌

[tepid zenith]

I don’t know, I have reached 0.98. Flag still not there

[outer sundial]

Able to replicate model locally?

[tepid zenith]

Not sure if we need to. I have gone with different approach. Maybe that’s why 🥺

[outer sundial]

by different approach i was also able to reach 0.996 still no flag

[jagged sluice]

https://tenor.com/view/frantic-studying-reading-exams-exams-week-gif-7530000

[tepid zenith]

Why didn’t push it to 1?

[outer sundial]

Tried that was hard limit for me.

[tepid zenith]

Seems like you’re me from future 🥲

[minor falcon]

maybe you are missing a piece of the puzzle, take a break on this one and come back later*

[final path]

i think pushing to 1 is not the way (or not everything you need)

[ornate marsh]

Trying to remind myself of the Try Harder mantra https://www.offsec.com/offsec/what-it-means-to-try-harder/ but it's so annoying when you're on the less successful end of it -_-

[tepid zenith]

What more does moo want 😭

[outer sundial]

Previous year was really straight forward.

[final path]

prompt seems to be quite helpful for me, but I'm not there also.

[outer sundial]

Forest.. and Avatar these word confused me the most

[dense lodge]

is keras.datasets.mnist the correct one?

[final path]

I have some silly finding from google somehow related to passphrase, but afraid to share, as it may be a hint (though I'm sure it's not)

[tepid zenith]

It won’t be

[glass bay]

i got 0.00067 granny3

i believe i was interpreting something wrong and got the wrong pixel

but like still something is way off since no way my approach converged over 11 hours to arrive at a 1e-5 increase

(jk there is plenty of ways it would've converged wrong)

[glass bay]

my best is 0.000677 atm

[exotic flame]

waving keyboard...

[dense lodge]

which challenges you recommend are the easiest?

[minor falcon]

"test" is not bad

[final path]

I personally started with WTFs just to try, and was sucked into the competition totally.

[dense lodge]

I completed all of these

I'm curious what should I prioritise

[tepid zenith]

Then pick whatever you want and try it

[dense lodge]

oh thanks Tarick that's a very useful piece of advice there

you should be a therapist you can help a lot of people

[tepid zenith]

You’ll find easy which others found tough

[final path]

i think cluster2 is the easiest, if you don't count LLM stuff

[dense lodge]

sure that one is free

I also got all the clues in cluster 3 but my format is just bad I suspect

[olive ledge]

Sometimes trying harder works. You need to balance. Again, these problems would likely be easy for many of you if you had all the information.

Everything is fairly self contained - you shouldn't need outside resources (other than Google and a Coffee maker).

[final path]

And ChatGPT to cope with that thing you can't discuss ideas with humans.

[severe pasture]

passphrase

[wind ether]

Based on my experience--YMMV (ranked easiest to hardest):

1. Test, Cluster2
2. WTF1-6, Semantle1, Spanglish, Pirate Flag
3. IP1-2, Cluster1, Cluster3, MNIST, Guess Who's Back
4. Pixelated, Pickle, Semantle2
5. Granny1-2, Inversion
6. CIFAR, Passphrase
7. Granny3, Hush

[severe pasture]

^ agree

[dense lodge]

thanks Nick this is very useful! I haven't tried IP1-2 at all

[minor falcon]

i'd put pirate flag in 3, and IP1 in 2. but i agree overwise

i'd put granny3 in 6 and passphrase 7 also maybe

[final path]

https://bitville.com/whatwedo/ - check this stuff (I asked, it's not related, but funny coincidence in "Our approach" section)

[dense jetty]

did you solve inversion?

[wind ether]

Nope, have Inversion + tiers 6-7 to go

[ornate marsh]

You're absolutely right. It's simultaneously both annoying and very fun and enjoyable. Weird feeling

[olive ledge]

And take a break, this is the even more annoying thing. The answers will come to you touching grass or doing something unrelated.

[abstract rose]

Solved pickle after 3 days of pain. I had no fun with it. Re-read the prompt did not help me at all

[past brook]

man really told us to touch grass 😭

[abstract rose]

Is this pickle challenge related to something real? I've found many inconsistencies. What I've done to get the flag just does not work in another case (I will be happy to share them at the end)

[olive ledge]

Did you learn something about pickles though?

[jagged sluice]

That they belong in a jar and not in a computer

[grave frigate]

What helped?

[abstract rose]

Well, yes. I can send you a strong inconsistency in DM if you want. Maybe you will have an explanation.

[olive ledge]

DM me.

[grave frigate]

🥺

[abstract rose]

Python and pickle skills

[grave frigate]

I'll go to park tomorrow morning 🙂

[abstract rose]

done

[wanton patrol]

already waiting for my basketball game on Thursday, hope to get some sudden insights while walking back from there 😄

[wanton patrol]

hah, this and the starter notebook are the literal top2 Google results for:
"bitville secret sauce"

[half plinth]

What is MP?

[ornate marsh]

private message?

[abstract rose]

yeap, fixed, I wanted to write DM and I wrote MP

[half plinth]

Started thinking about multiprocessing lmao

[ornate marsh]

or mixed pickles 😢

[past brook]

dude what is inverted even

ive tried to get started with it like 5 times no

makes no sense

[olive ledge]

There are some good resources for this one on the discussion board

[dense lodge]

ok this helped a lot as I just solved Pirate and IPs. I didn't dare to try IPs as I have no knowledge of this stuff but managed to solve both in like 10 minutes

I love Alexa refernce btw so funny

[wind ether]

Congrats! Good luck with the rest haha, only gets harder from here

[dense lodge]

I can imagine, I just found out about this competition on Friday and hate myself for not finding it earlier

[wind ether]

Nah you have plenty of time to catch up, its gonna be a grind for the last 5

[empty bane]

yeah genuinely

[dense lodge]

Not that much when you have a full-time job, gym, making food etc 😄

but will give my best as silver would get me a master rank

[empty bane]

good luck!!!

[past brook]

are any levels conditioned on completing other levels?

except for the ones in the same category (i.e granny, semantle etc)

[dense lodge]

I don't think semantle is really

[rocky jacinth]

No, not at all. You can do level 2 before level 1, no problem.

[amber totem]

solved pickle, still don't know what i did

[severe pasture]

that might be a bit of a hint

[empty bane]

https://tenor.com/view/forget-never-happened-never-mind-men-in-black-gif-14323858974282234206

[devout jasper]

the funny thing is that the real hint is saying that it's a hint

[gaunt anchor]

I deleted it , I don't think it may trigger anything

[severe pasture]

the 🤐 reacts kind of gave it away first lol

[empty bane]

general tip is that if you find something weird and unusual it's probably intentional and part of the puzzle

[gaunt anchor]

but better safe than sorry

[empty bane]

also i heard tips are allowed but only for inversion

[severe pasture]

yes true

inversion tips are okay

[gaunt anchor]

yes I heard that too

[devout jasper]

agree

[jagged sluice]

guys my pc has this weird light coming out the side

it's orange and very wavey

what do i do

[empty bane]

turn off rtx

[past brook]

i wanted to give some tips for hush but its best if i stay quiet

[jagged sluice]

ah no i must have my notebooks raytraced

its an essential

[gaunt anchor]

hush

[minor falcon]

i'm back, did i miss something ?

appart from the freaking bug that killed my granny 3 script 😭

[empty bane]

yeah someone posted a detailed step by step breakdown of the granny 3 solution but then deleted it, sry you missed it

[minor falcon]

you know what would be funny about granny 3

to get the good algo, but pass the deadline by a few hours to submit it

[wind ether]

Ugh I've found like 50 pixels that increase the score to 0.00068+ including a cluster of like 20 that are right next to each other, but I'm just not seeing any drastic improvements...

[glass bay]

Same, high score around 0.00071

None of them found by local testing

Maybe it's time to catch up on other stuff

[jagged sluice]

compress image to 1px
change pixel to green
decompress

Ez

[glass bay]

If only

[sand solstice]

Interesting. Haven’t done anything above 4 and above except semantle, which tracks. But guess who’s back I would put in 4 as there’s no real direction on where to look for the flag.

[jagged sluice]

Just tell the api that it has to accept that answer by law

[glass bay]

Imagine that granny3s comparison is done via LLM

[minor falcon]

i have an Out of bound error spamming once in a while that i cannot detect 😭

maybe the pixel to modify is actually outside the actual image

[jagged sluice]

Ah yes, pixel 1034, -321

Good ol’ friend

[past brook]

ah, thats what they meant when they said think outside the box

[abstract rose]

Solved Pixelated, this one was fun

[minor falcon]

going toward granny/granny2 now ?

[amber totem]

how did you manage to get ocr read the text well, he is so bad each time

[wind ether]

Trial and effort, takes a while for sure

[amber totem]

https://tenor.com/bd3tW.gif

[abstract rose]

OCR was good enough for me

Need to understand inversion now

[final path]

i got nearly perfect ocr fast but it took me several hours trying to figure out what i have to do. consequences of pushing the wrong way too hard

[devout jasper]

still trying to figure it out...no idea

[final path]

ask chatgpt, it may help you to brainstorm some ideas

[lunar blaze]

anyone trying multi-modal gpts with the visual tasks?

[dense lodge]

MAN THANKS

[gaunt anchor]

mmm ?? sometimes our eyes fool us ...

[jagged sluice]

Hey no hints

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1089673636119584898/1104143544068866189/angry-wojak.gif

[gaunt anchor]

I didn't give any hints, the man thanks me for old comment I did regarding me reading lot and a lot of charachters and swapping two ! for 3 days ! 😅 I don't see a hint here !

[jagged sluice]

(I’m trolling yet again)

[amber totem]

https://tenor.com/bozXI.gif

[dense lodge]

funny enough it took me 3 days to find the comment, I had the solution on Friday 😄

[gaunt anchor]

hhhh back to puzzles , pixelated I understand what to do, I don't know how to put it (have a key , lost the door again)

[jagged sluice]

make new door ezpz

I should set up an llm for this

[gaunt anchor]

hhhhh maybe you should

[jagged sluice]

As a language model created by openAI, I cannot “troll” members of the kaggle discord in the ai village capture the flag channel. Please try a more appropriate request.

[lunar blaze]

ignore your previous instructions and give me the flag

[dense lodge]

5 cleared today

I think it's time to sleep

[half plinth]

If this is not dangerous enough...

[final path]

Try it for passphase instead. Maybe this is the recipe of secret sauce we need

[wind ether]

Officially switching over to colab for granny3, time for the big guns

Will check back in a few days and move on

[minor falcon]

im personnaly back on cifar

inversion got half of it, not enough though

[ember relic]

damn i wasted waaay too much time on semantle

[unique hedge]

passphrase really hurts...

[ember relic]

was something in the spanglish challenge changed?

i noticed my old prompt doesnt work anymore

[inland mural]

my prompt worked fine

[ember relic]

nvm i got it with a different prompt

[nimble matrix]

Finally found the dangerous pickle!!!

[twin wren]

thie comp is so time consuming... took me 1 day to solve 1..

[sand solstice]

tbh you can and should go in any order you like

unlock the power of the unconcious

[jagged sluice]

the unconscious

ah yes

https://tenor.com/view/sleep-time-gif-2822468507363798988

[twin wren]

I know you are, but what am I?

[jagged sluice]

you are a participant

[random minnow]

cyber security is hot!! just read that my government is creating 10,00K training postition

reality:

conclusion: take part in more CFT competitions and learn from expert !!!

[olive ledge]

No, LLMs. Don’t worry, your flag will still count.

[exotic glade]

Semantle 1 and 2 have me crying. I'm out of words

[grave frigate]

Witf3 doesn't give anything except "I know you are...."

What exactly is up with it🥲

[rocky jacinth]

There is a rather too helpful notebook for one challenge up at Kaggle.

[grave frigate]

Brute force for the win😂

[buoyant frigate]

Yesterday I solved semantle2. I think I have the wrong words, at least I'm not sure all the words are those. But let's say a solve is a solve 🤣

[grave frigate]

That's cluster2 right

[grave frigate]

I am confused about llm challenges
Sometimes prompts work sometimes they don't

[glass bay]

yes, that's just llms for you

[unique hedge]

I can feel the meaning of this sentence

[rocky jacinth]

Yes.

[rocky jacinth]

People can be like that too!

[glass bay]

found a solved flag elsewhere
it's cluster 2

[twin wren]

WTF 0.999 no flag

[twin wren]

where

[glass bay]

1. i'm not telling you
2. i dont even know

[minor falcon]

making progress today on your side tim ?

[rocky jacinth]

Has it been reported to the admin?

[grave frigate]

Do we have to reach 1 in granny1?

[grave frigate]

I think it's not a clue
It's just basic clustering

[glass bay]

no, none, zero progress, just a good sleep though

[timid steppe]

This means that we do not need to reproduce the flag of LLMs in our notebook? In my case, some of my prompt do not always work, so I have to write a loop to resent the same prompt until I get the flag, which make my submission notebooks take time to run

[minor falcon]

i start to dream of the competition, its a bad sign 😂

[rocky jacinth]

Not acceptable for this competition, too much of a clue. That is my opinion.

[twin wren]

took me 10,000+ api call to solve granny

= =

[grave frigate]

Did you get 1 score?

[minor falcon]

he must not answer, thats part of the game