08-03-2006, 11:46 AM
a few people were trying. It was discussed a bit on the FB IRC channel.
The technique being used, was a brute force, looking for a complete border around the image. I used a slightly modified verion, looking for more patchy borders, prepared to take more false negatives.
However, I, and i guess the others, got bored after i let it run for about 16 hours. I actually recoded the inner loops of mine in ASM, and it was still very slow going. I think i was trying about 5-15 thousand numbers per second, when it was at full speed, but most of the time, i couldn't run it this fast because i wanted to use the machine for other stuff.
Considering though, it needed to try 4 billion combinations, it was going to take too long, and i could not be guarenteed that there would be a border as such to find.
I'd be interested to see the actual image, and know the number pass, to see if what i wrote, would actually have ever cracked it, given the time.
None of use expected you to pay if we did get it, and i don't think it took anyone longer than an hour to write their program.
The technique being used, was a brute force, looking for a complete border around the image. I used a slightly modified verion, looking for more patchy borders, prepared to take more false negatives.
However, I, and i guess the others, got bored after i let it run for about 16 hours. I actually recoded the inner loops of mine in ASM, and it was still very slow going. I think i was trying about 5-15 thousand numbers per second, when it was at full speed, but most of the time, i couldn't run it this fast because i wanted to use the machine for other stuff.
Considering though, it needed to try 4 billion combinations, it was going to take too long, and i could not be guarenteed that there would be a border as such to find.
I'd be interested to see the actual image, and know the number pass, to see if what i wrote, would actually have ever cracked it, given the time.
None of use expected you to pay if we did get it, and i don't think it took anyone longer than an hour to write their program.