Over at Low BDD Estimate · Issue #33 Ben reports a bug that, on first sight and unfortunately, does not stand out much. For some unusual parameters the Lattice Estimator reports wrong results. Given that we rely on a variety of heuristics to keep the running time down and given that the whole thing is mostly developed on the side, this is – again, unfortunately – not surprising.
Debugging “corner cases” can often do wonders to improve the robustness of a given piece of software. For example, back in the days when I worked a lot on M4RI, as much as I dreaded fixing bugs that only showed up on Solaris boxes, those bugs always revealed some shady assumptions in my code that were bound to produce problems elsewhere down the line.
Indeed, I think this bug puts the finger on the heuristics we rely upon and where they can go wrong. The parameter sets that Ben has in mind are quite unusual in that we have to pick quite a large dimension 
On the other hand, truth be told, between this, the estimator being “mostly developed on the side” and all the other stuff I have to do, I doubt I’ll sink significant time into fixing this bug anytime soon.
But, and this is point of this post, perhaps someone would like to take this bug as an invitation to help to improve the Lattice Estimator? While, the estimator is quite widely relied upon to, well, estimate the difficulty of solving LWE and related problems, its bus factor is uncomfortably low. I’d say attempting to fix this bug would take whoever attempts to fix it on a whirlwind tour through the code base; a good way to learn it and to improve it.
Interested? Get in touch.
malb::blog 