Subject:
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Re: Mars DVD solutions posted
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.space, lugnet.general
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Date:
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Sun, 25 Apr 2004 02:16:15 GMT
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Viewed:
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1208 times
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Spoiler alert if you were going to try solving the code yourself.
Hints if you tried and gave up.
In lugnet.general, Brian Davis wrote:
> In lugnet.space, Kelly McKiernan wrote:
>
> > If you're a geek like me who spent time solving the Mars Rover DVD...
>
> Not only that, but I owe geeks like you for informing me about the contest.
> Thank you, it was a lot of fun! I got a whole class of 3rd-6th graders started
> on code-breaking due to that contest <grin>...
Thanks for posting the original contest notification. I would never
have known about it otherwise. Of course, I did waste the majority of a
day on this problem. The reason I kept going was the lure of getting
those certificates.
My major time waster was trying to interpret Spirit as Morse code before
reading any hints. I knew it would be some form of Huffman code.
Once I read clue 2, a quick web search for {Author} and {Title} resulted
in a page of text containing the plain text of clue 1. Surprisingly, to
me anyway, that text was found on the Planetary Society web site. I was
about an hour from the solution at this point.
The key to isolating the text was in the punctuation. Notice clue 1 had
a few non-standard characters. I lost most of an hour by assuming only
alphanumerics would be encoded. One very common character is encoded.
Clues 4 and 5 together state the kind of Huffman coding was used. Clues
3 and 6 can be inferred by noticing the spacing between the punctuation
in clue 1. All substrings have a length with a common divisor, given in
clue 6. Clue 3 just means the problem can be broken into two simpler
problems. All further clues explicitly give the answer letter by letter.
> > What I found interesting was the first 10 solvers of each code... [and]
> > 30 randomly-chosen people who successfully solved the codes.
> >
> > Don't suppose anybody here's gotten notice they won?
>
> Nope, and no chance on the Spirit code (I needed hint #6 before I was able to
> crack it - partly due to time limitations, partly due to intelligence).
> Opportunity I was early on, (but probably not within an hour - Wow!), but
> probably not that early. What surprised me, actually, was how *few* (relatively
> speaking) people solved the code - I mean, at the end the hints were pretty much
> give-aways (no slight intended - I still don't know how people were doing it
> with only, essentially, the first hint).
I can see two reasons. The main one being row order vs. column order.
I lost a chunk of time by analyzing the bits in the wrong order.
How was this event publicized? These posts are the only thing I saw.
Had this been cross-posted to .robotics I am sure many more of the code
jockeys would have jumped at the opportunity.
> > Funny about that Opportunity code, though... I didn't realize it
> > was Braille,
>
> Funny 'bout that - I realized it within about 10 minutes of looking at it. I
> was very proud of this, until I showed it to a 5th-grader who within 10-15
> seconds of looking at the picture, said "it's braille - where's the dictionary?"
> Oh well, being humbled is good for me <grin>...
I spent 10 minutes before realizing it was Braille. I showed it to my
wife and she had it in 5 seconds.
Doug
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Mars DVD solutions posted
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| (...) Just got word from The Planetary Society that they haven't sent out any notifications yet, but will soon. They also haven't settled on which LEGO prizes will be awarded. And in addition to LEGO prizes, they'll be awarding a one-year membership (...) (20 years ago, 27-Apr-04, to lugnet.space, lugnet.general)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Mars DVD solutions posted
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| (...) Not only that, but I owe geeks like you for informing me about the contest. Thank you, it was a lot of fun! I got a whole class of 3rd-6th graders started on code-breaking due to that contest <grin>... (...) Nope, and no chance on the Spirit (...) (20 years ago, 24-Apr-04, to lugnet.space, lugnet.general, FTX)
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