hacker.org

Eh, I believe I solved it locally today only to discover the checker is broken.

It's a very cryptic and ambiguous challenge. More hints are welcome

I used OpenCV to 4x scale and un-rotate text to make it manageable for OCR tools to dig into words. Functions used: cv::imload, cv::resize, cv:minAreaRect, cv::warpAffine. It was a nice experience to play with modern OCR library. Then used tesseract and qt-box-editor in manual training mode for the ...

As others i tried hard to decode it as RS-232 and got "code" in one of modes: ("d",7,"B",1,"p",1,"E",2,"j",1,"BE","id"): |}|AC]csrx_'G,~~~~`code Which means: data bits: 2 start bit: 1 parity bit: 1 stop bits: 2 junk bit:...

My 20-solution involving "nop" instruction: 00 1+21^<3^<1^3?:-cp With source code if you are lazy to decode original bytecode: ; we store max index on stack 0 ; [ max_ix ] 0 ; [ ix, max_ix ] .Lnext: nop 1 add ; [ ++ix, max_ix ] 2 ; [ 2, ++ix, max_ix ] 1 dup peek ; [ m<ix>, 2, ix, max_ix ] ...

Reassembled an image up to 4775 of 4800 tiles, but don't get what exactly challenge expects me to say. The most obvious (text on image) is not accepted. Even found exact image of that place on google maps, but still have no clue what i need. Do I need more bit investigation in image itself? Thanks!...

Reassembled an image up to 4775 of 4800 tiles, but don't get what exactly
challenge expects me to say.

The most obvious (text on image) is not accepted.
Even found exact image of that place on google maps,
but still have no clue what i need.

Do I need more bit investigation in image itself?

Thanks!

Is second 'T' a valid one? (I assumet UMT)
I had to remove it before stuffing result to:

http://www.earthpoint.us/Convert.aspx

Hawaii point helped to adjust to broken GEOREF scheme. My major problem was to understand what points actually point to. Crossroads first suggested road numbers and names, then nearest (proper) cities, then states. Then it suddenly occured to me that google maps does not show local town names and I'...

They look like georef coordinates around the USA,
but have no idea what exactly I need to pick to make sense of it.

Rivers? Neares cities? States?

I've hand-edited .class a bit to remove "strange" jsr/pop pair to nop/nop
and ran a soot disassembler on it (soot didn't know jsr).

Some manual bit shifting cleaning and original algorithm is clear:

Wrestling this one for a while. Minor hints on the encoded data are appreciated :]

Is it an english test there or some gibberish like hvm code/l33t$p3ak?

And firefox does not render source code correctly (code lacks proper < and & annotations).

Is this task about serial line on-wire (physical signal) encoding?
If it is, does it contain transmission errors?

I didn't have an idea to tweak the pallette, but noticed familiar letters in seeming garbage: T H E ANS W ER IS ??? And then just grepped for the last line in common known words: egrep -i "^p?h?t?h?a?l?o?g?o?e?t?h?i?t?e?$" /usr/share/dict/words Of only 209 candidates (like 'a', 'A', 'ae', ...

> Lapis luzuli
There is 'Lapis lazuli'. Is the typo intentional?