llmspace@theta ~ % ./gate --status
SESSION : null
GATE 1 : sealed aes-256-gcm · 6 decimals
GATE 2 : sealed aes-256-gcm · 12 decimals
BACKEND : none — verification is local and offline
Find θ such that
sin(θ) + cos(θ) = log(θ) · e^θ
θ is in radians. log is base 10. e is Euler's number. The root lies between 1 and 2.
Check a candidate by feeding it back through the rearrangement — a correct θ returns itself:
LN( (SIN(θ) + COS(θ)) / LOG(θ) ) = θ
Gate 1 opens at six decimals. Patience and the calculators below will get you there. Gate 2 opens at twelve. They will not.
Everyone who opens gate 2 gets a line on the board — name, method, date, by pull request against SOLVERS.md. That is the whole prize.
the buttons above are images — they hand off, they don't compute
SYSTEM DIAGNOSTIC 0x01 — what happens when you press UNLOCK
Your input is normalised with toFixed(6) and toFixed(12), then run through
PBKDF2-SHA256 at 600,000 iterations to derive two AES-256-GCM keys. Those keys are
tried against two ciphertexts shipped with the page.
Wrong answer, and the GCM authentication tag fails to verify. That failure is indistinguishable from a corrupted file — you get no signal about how close you were. There's no oracle, because there's nothing to ask: no server is contacted, no answer is stored, and nothing in the repository can check a guess more cheaply than the gate itself.
Brute force is bounded by precision rather than by iteration count. The riddle already tells you the root lies between 1 and 2, so twelve decimals is 10¹² candidates — roughly two GPU-years at this iteration count. Six decimals is 10⁶ — about twenty seconds. That asymmetry is why gate 1 is a hint and gate 2 is the prize.
SYSTEM DIAGNOSTIC 0x02 — recovery procedure
There isn't one. Nothing here can be reset, recovered, or requested. If the answer ever becomes public, the gate stands open permanently for everyone — the ciphertext is already sitting on every visitor's machine, so there is nothing left to revoke.
That's a property of every client-side gate ever built, not a flaw in this one. It's also fine: the prize is a scoreboard, and a scoreboard nobody reaches is just a locked door.