... What’s stopping someone from copying another players hash and posting it as their thesis without knowing what the plaintext is, just to aggressively cancel the first player’s thesis?

Formally the thesis is the collection of outputs, so it comes before the plaintext is even created.

Sure, but that can’t be verified and there’s no mechanism that actually forces a player to know what their thesis is - posting a hash that they plausibly believe to contain a valid thesis seems likely to be legal to me.

So maybe the new rule should be “If a researcher generates and reveals another Thesis”
Even if the first researcher pretends it didn’t cancel theirs, it’s not like they can declare victory at that point since it could be called out as invalid the moment they post it.

It does look like you can just copy their outputs and change the salt once someone reveals it to declare victory though, so the salt should probably be excluded from this check.

Actually ignore that, changing the salt changes the hash. I’m being dumb.

Or actually, I’m seeing the fault with it now. Josh is right that you can maliciously block people basically for free. If the final output is 27 and the salt is Bears, then you can declare that an output of 2 has a salt of 7Bears. Maybe the salt needs a delimiter. Something like all salts must be in angular brackets.

I don’t understand why both theses have to be invalid; surely invalidating the latter is sufficient.

I think the point is so you can prove foul play. The second thesis isn’t meant to be a real one, it’s intended to show that the first one is too ambiguous to be counted.

Added a line that the generated thesis has to be different in order to render the other one invalid

The 27 thing is a valid point, but also something I’m trying to fix in a manner that doesn’t reset the timer on peoples theses

Goal was to prevent a scenario where you could claim victory on both 27 and 2 being that last output, and make us believe that bears or 7bears was your salt. But I missed how easy that scenario was to hit, was instead thinking of scenarios where like, you had the names of functions in your salt or in your function outputs

But I can’t think of a way to fix that problem tonight already up way too late so guess will see where things stand in the morning

This still leaves a bit of a hole. If you have a thesis of Func1: 11, Func2: 12, Func3: 13, Func4: 14, Func5: 15, Salt: Cookies then it could be blocked by a thesis of Func1: 11, Func2: 12, Func3: 13, Func4: 14, Func5: 1, Salt: 5Cookies

Ah sorry, didn’t check for more posts. Ignore that post.

But I’ll probably vote FOR on another version.