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The "thing" telecran refers to is not known with that word in Germany and strangely google seems to filter pages refering to it somehow. If you are German, try to google at google.xx where xx is any other country than de.

But the question is What is the biggest number that can be displayed using this abacus (without destroying or rearranging it)? You can use the Chinese abacus with base 16, the two upper beads stand for 5 each, the lower 5 represent 1 each, so 5+5+5=16-1. This one could be used with the left five as ...

Mine was almost the same as aurora's. Running with PHP on command line after some time I had the answer written in the console. But I needed several days because the script stopped execution a few times due to network timeouts. <?php $url = "http://www.hacker.org/challenge/misc/minuteman.php&qu...

The biggest number I could think of to be displayed with this 10x10 abacus is a 16 digit number starting with 3 and ending with 5 ... but that's not the correct solution . Is there really a way to display even bigger numbers?

Look at the characters you get and if they carry any further meaning ...

I had the same problems, google only returned me links to Luxembourg and the telecran magazine, even though I have my firefox configured to request pages in English and I use google.com configured do talk to me in English and to display results in all languages. But seems Google still brings localiz...

I used gzdecode(), but since this function seems to be not yet part of PHP, I used the function I found in the user contributed notes.

Hm I don't get this challenge ... the output of this program depends on the initialization of the memory, there are 312 values that do not cause a "too many cycles" error, I have tried the minimum, maximum and some in between, but I don't believe I have to test all possible values. I built...

I also used PHP and then had the answer in an instant, most time I spent finding out the right PHP functions and how they work as the gzip library is not very well documented and some of the functions mentioned are not even present in the current release.

Yes, I also had problems finding a source with the same version, but once I found one it was not too hard anymore.

<?php $cipher = "93752xxx746x27x1754xx90x93xxxxx238x44x75xx08750912738x8461x8759383xx328x4x4935903x6x5550360535004x0xx945958961296x267x8842xxx5x6xx61x4x48482x80xxx83316843x7x4x83x9521731xxx25x51xx457x6x5x9698222x771237745034x5133592x27xx8x87xx35221x36x0x50x23x7x63x998418xx"; $sum = 0; for...

I would say you are not on the right track, because the answer is very clear when you found how to decode it.

I also tried it with brute force first but was too slow and I had an error somewhere so after all the time there was no result. I went to bed then and kept thinking of the problem and I then found a much more efficient way, tried it the next day and it cracks the cipher in 2 seconds .

Yes brute force was quick in this case and I filtered the results with a regular expression match to show me only those strings that contained only word characters, whites space characters, " and ', which gave me 3 results, the third was the one .

Has anybody solved this challange using GMP (and PHP)? I run into memory problems as GMP seems not to liberate memory before the program is finished. I found a bug entry at PHP: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=33249 which says this problem is GMP related, so I would expect this happens in any program...