Replicate The Blind Machine experiments
AI agent skillIndependently reproduce the experiments in The Blind Machine paper and confirm its published numbers, using only the open Blind CLI and public data — no hosted service, no credentials, no private records.
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Install the whole repository into your agent's skills directory in one command — it unpacks as a
ready-to-use replicate/ folder (change -C
to your skills path):
curl -fsSL https://blindmachine.org/skills/replicate/archive | tar xz -C ~/.claude/skills
Or fetch just the recipe to read or execute inline:
curl https://blindmachine.org/skills/replicate.md
# TroubleshootingMost replication failures are environment issues, not regressions in the paper.Classify each as **SKIP** (a tool or resource you could not provide) or **FAIL**(the experiment ran and produced a wrong number). Only a genuine wrong number is aFAIL.## Setup and toolchain- **`uv: command not found`** — install uv (https://docs.astral.sh/uv/). Until then the synthetic and real-genome runs are **SKIP**.- **First `run_all.sh` is slow or downloads a lot** — expected: the six bundles seal their environments and download TenSEAL (over Microsoft SEAL) once, then reuse them. Not a failure.- **TenSEAL build fails** — usually a missing C++ toolchain or an unsupported platform. This is **SKIP** (a build-environment issue), not a paper regression.## Real-genome studies (E5-E8)- **`bcftools: command not found`** — E5-E8 need `bcftools`; without it they are **SKIP**. The synthetic evaluation (Section 10) does not need it and should still run.- **Network / IGSR fetch fails or times out** — E5-E8 fetch bounded chr22 intervals from the public 1000 Genomes FTP. A network failure is **SKIP**.- **A study writes only aggregate outputs** — expected and correct: individual genotype vectors are kept under an ignored `work/` directory by design.## Interpreting numbers- **A synthetic ciphertext size is off by tens of bytes at 192/256-bit** — expected: only the 128-bit sizes are byte-deterministic; 192/256-bit sizes drift across TenSEAL builds. Check exactness (`max_error == 0`) and the shrinking-size trend, not the exact byte count, at those levels. Not a FAIL.- **A 128-bit ciphertext size differs from `references/expected-results.md`** — this IS a **FAIL**; those counts are deterministic.- **`max_error` is nonzero anywhere** — **FAIL**. The exactness claim is that decrypted BFV output equals the plaintext oracle exactly.- **E8 `r2` = 1.0000 on pair 4** — expected; it is a small-count artifact, not a wrong number.## What a clean PASS looks like`run_all.sh` prints `RESULT: PASS`, `verify.py` exits zero, all six 128-bitciphertext sizes match, `max_error` is 0 everywhere, and the E5-E8 headline numbersmatch `references/expected-results.md`.Part of the Replicate The Blind Machine experiments agent skill.