In part of my research, I have been heavily involved with building portfolios of optimization algorithms. Optimization algorithms stay at the root of many computational tasks, from designing laser mirror systems to neural network training. We want to find a minimum (or maximum) of some mathematical function, and for some functions it’s easier than for others.
For very many fairly hairy functions, the best state-of-art optimization algorithm is based on genetic algorithms and it’s called CMA-ES. It also has a very nice Python implementation by its original author, Nikolaus Hansen.
CMA-ES is still not as good as it could be on some functions with many local optima, but its performance can be much improved by establishing a restart strategy that will repeatedly restart it with varying population size and parameters. The best performing restart strategy is BIPOP-CMA-ES and unfortunately, it had no Python implementation so far. I took care of that more than a month ago, but since it’s taking some time to get my modifications upstreamed, if anyone would find that useful,
here is a patch for CMA-1.1.02 adding BIPOP restart strategy
Since long long ago, SUSE glibc supports blowfish crypt() extension – just start your crypts with $2a$ etc. and crypt() will fry them using Blowfish. We base this functionality on a rather ancient OWL patch. I wonder if anyone actually makes use of this feature. ;-)
The trouble is, the OWL patch is pretty dirty and introduces its own wrapper crypt() that proxies between glibc’s MD5/DES crypt() and its Blowfish backend. And it has a lot of extra functionality noone cannot use since the appropriate symbols aren’t actually exported anymore. The patch is based on glibc-2.3.x, I assume back then exporting them worked differently.
However, glibc-2.7 got support for SHA256/SHA512 and with it more flexible crypt() implementation, making it quite easy to plug in more crypt() methods. The trouble is, we didn’t upgrade our Blowfish patch, so SHA256/SHA512 was actually blocked-out by the wrapper. Jan Engelhardt pointed out the problem, so I reworked the original OWL patch to take advantage of the new infrastructure (but keeping crypt_blowfish.c intact up to turning off BF_ASM).
So, if you want to teach your glibc Blowfish hashing, feel free to use http://pasky.or.cz/~pasky/dev/glibc/crypt_blowfish-1.0-suse.diff :-)
Update: Dmitry V. Levin ported the complete old patch to glibc-2.10.1. I will not make use of this for SUSE since I think wrapper.c is rather ugly hack which is not properly integrated to the infrastructure, and it retains potential for future maintenance problems; I don’t see why shouldn’t the new API rather integrate into the existing code instead of wrapping around it. The new API is required for tcb but there is no other support for it in SUSE anyway (and noone missed the API for many, many years).
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