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efe wrote:The following Python-Code instantly prints out the answer:

Code: Select all

x,p = 0,1
while p!=x:
	p,x = x,pow(2,x,10**10)
print x-3

Wow, I didn't know that Python's pow is capable of modding. Nice!

It's funny, but this was one of the hardest challenges for me. Since first approaching the challenge and finally solving it, I solved like 150 other challenges. (I thought it had something to do with Luxembourg and its media or its connection to the other 3 countries. I also thought about some encod...

Thanks. BTW: The solution can be derived from http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/A121319 if one subtracts 3... I did it with modular exponentiation as described in http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/51625.html , using some online tool like http://banach.millersville.edu/~bob/math478/...

Hi! I calculated the rotation by finding the highest/lowest x/y pixels and using arctan. Then I used "gocr", trained it with 200 captures, and used a hash table to find duplicates. I had to look over 100 false positives and finally found the correct pair. Interesting. My first estimation ...

there is a slight randomness to number of frames per digit. That explains a lot. I almost thought I missed something. Thanks for pointing this out! i think you'll be okay, because most of the time a digit isn't repeated more than a couple times, so it's pretty obvious how many there are. as you've ...

It would have been nice if the numbers evenly matched some fixed number of frames. I know how many numbers are supposed to be in there. Unfortunately, they don't seem to match the frames. So after a while, things get screwed up. Is there any hint about how the frames should be grouped for each number?

First I calculated the center and the rotation (by linear regression analysis) Oh, this is of course the better, faster and more robust approach! I did it pure ad-hoc: Rotate and trim the images with ImageMagick until they got minimal height. It was funny that the best score was made by "docke...

How did you solve it? First, I tried employing some OCR software. I had to roughly correct the orientation of the images, because neither Finereader nor Omnipage seem to support big rotations. After all, they both didn't perform well enough to give me the answer. So I further straightened the images...

yeah, that's me. a painful moment in my past =) Ouch, must have hurt in the knees. You're just too tall! :) Btw: is this supposed to be a kind of advanced version of Mayurasana? I myself don't even come into the starting position of this... tried Kakasana several times but find it quite difficult.

MerickOWA wrote:I did it by hand... just stepping frame by frame in the browser.

Yep, its just left/right-arrows in Quicktime. I did it simultaneously with laptop and PC to prevent switching apps.

tails wrote: Thank you... I have made my code a bit more insane.

Oh no! Why did you do that? Now I also have to squeeze some more...

I half agree, but so far it looks like adum has been careful not to make anything else depend on solving KOTH challenges. Then the lower left will be the first city that's a deadlock ... I don't think the first people to attempt a challenge should retain any special credit - so early solvers' score...

The whole sense of this site is to get/apply programming skills

Good God, do I have to beat tail's solution to reach that city? This seems to be very hard for a challenge which promises to be central for follow-ups. And this is again a point where I really don't like the king-of-the-hill system: If I try hard and eventually beat tail's current solution, he defin...

Oh, thank you for this analysis! This just saved me debugging a similar effect in my code. And btw: This also seems to be the reason for the trace-output of the stack being messed up.