hacker.org

... "in the traditional way" ...

Almost; two little tricks help with big numbers, though (both a math trick and a coding trick).
That should not reveal too much info, I hope.

scheme vs. Lisp: Scheme is a lisp with guaranteed tail-call elimination, guaranteed continuation support and a few other nice semantic highlights. The syntax is lisp (aka functions with parens around). btw. the number and usage of parens is the same, so megabreit probably had too much of dope when l...

yes, smalltalk's syntax was made to read like english, with object, predicate, subject as in: someObject doSomethingWith: argument. Once you got used to its (non-C-like) syntax, it reads very easy. ((and it has all those fancy features like closures, reflection, meta-class protocols etc. seems like ...

tried some other ascii decoding on groups-of-8 bytes of the yes-no bits forst, when suddenly (while looking at the bits in a hex-viewer) I had the aha effect...

remembering my old Lisp days, I used a hash into a collection of hashTableSize linked lists (cons pairs). I am hashing on (value MOD hashTableSize). The list is searched sequentially.

I took successive 8-digit sequences as hashkey a set of already encountered positions for that 8digit sequence. When encountering an already hashed sequence, look if it is acrually longer and remrember the longest. Takes 4 seconds to find the answer in unoptimized code. _98_arepeatOfPI |sequenceHash...

sometimes it helps to "think" before starting to hack in some code !
compuation is done in a few milliseconds if done right.

there is no need for it be prime, so please do not discard your result simply because it ends in zeros. (1 to:20) collect:[:n | n fib] gives: #(1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584 4181 6765) of which 8, 21, 34, 55 ... are NOT prime. And, as you can see, "fib 15" also g...

a png to rle converter helped - took only a few minutes to write... Here's the code: _141_populationOfLifeGeneration_saveFile |img wI hI w h sample row col board margin| margin := 100. img := (PNGReader readStream:(HTTPInterface get:'http://www.hacker.org/challenge/img/life2.png') data readStream) i...

yup, my code looks like: (push 0) "/ position (store 1000) (call plusExpression) (printInteger) (halt) ... (label plusExpression) (call mulExpression) ... (label mulExpression) (call factor) ... (label factor) (call peek) (sub $( ) (jmpEq0 parExpr) (push 0) "/ current-val (label digitLoop)...

I wont give you a hint, but an advice: go away, try some other puzzles and come back later. That gives you a "new look" at the picture.