Anubis rarely ever annoys me (I still prefer it over cloudflare’s Mitm) but this specific visit feels almost vindictive. It used half my CPU cores at full blast for three straight minutes.
It seems to be effective since I can’t really “bypass” it with extensions, so AI crawlers probably can’t either, but damn there really should be an option to complete a manual captcha or email the administrators to complain.
As I’m typing this the challenge is still running xD
I don’t know how protein folding works, but if it’s easy to check it’s correct, then doesn’t that violate that mathematical principle where verifying an answer is as difficult as computing the answer in the first place? I forget the name of it.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, volunteers at home are already self-selecting to be mostly honest and donating correct answers for a good cause. Their output trustworthiness is moderate-high. Spammers, bots, A.I. swarms, ddos networks, random users, etc… not so much. You can’t really trust their output at all, you have to verify it very carefully and treat it as malicious or just incorrect junk by default.
What you’re referring to is called the P vs NP problem, and you’ve got it backwards. The problem is basically “does having an easily verified answer mean that there is also an easy to FIND the answer” and all the evidence we have so far points to no, but we aren’t sure.
This is the entire concept behind cryptology - it’s easy to verify you have the correct key, because if you have the correct key you can decode the message and it isn’t gibberish. It is not, however, easy to figure out what the key is from the encrypted text.
You’re thinking, as someone else said, of P = NP. This is technically an unsolved problem. We don’t know if P = NP is true, there is no proof that guarantees it. However, it’s looking pretty unlikely.
This problem would have huge consequences for a wide range of fields, and it would break most cryptography and encryption algorithms we have (assuming it is proven true).
Anyway, this is what Anubis is already doing. That’s why OP complained about being stuck for 3 minutes with the CPU at full blast. Anubis gave the PC some problem that was difficult to compute. The problem itself was not important, it’s just to keep the computer busy for a bit. (The idea is that this significantly slows down spam bots and other automated access, I believe).
Of course Anubis has to verify the answer is correct, and that the client didn’t just send garbage. So the problem Anubis already uses is one that is easier to verify than to compute.
Btw, it is possible to verify solutions where checking is as expensive as solving. You provide each client with at least 2 problems. One where you already know the answer, and one where you don’t. You have the client solve both. If the known one is good, you let them through, and add the unknown one to the known set. You can even verify it by sending it to two other clients, see if they all get the same answer. But I believe that this solution wouldn’t be required, because protein folding ‘violates’ the P=NP problem.
You’re thinking of the P vs NP problem, but you got the details wrong. There are known cases where the answer is easy to verify.
What the distributed computing stuff does is check many many potential answers. You’re only interested in the right answers, and they’re easy to verify. If there’s a concern about junk answers, the answers could probably be compared across multiple clients to verify.