hacker.org

Couldn't the answer just be any of the following small text?
7, 49, 63, 77, 91, 221, or any other multiple of 7 not divisible by 2, 3, or 5?

I think it gives you a free grunt at the start of the game, regardless of if you built it or not.

Damn these NP-complete problems! :-) I don't think it's NP complete, actually. I'm fairly certain my implementation is running in quartic time. The times I'm getting seem to support it - it's at level 202 right now, and the average time to solve something has never drastically increased, as an effi...

No. This one just seemed to lend itself to that though. For the whole didactic string of things, I write my own programs.

Not much point in writing your own at all in my opinion; why reinvent the wheel when google can give you a web page that analyzes the text for you?

Failures as in keys that are obviously wrong?

Yeah... I'll try that.

Well, I've been working on this challenge for a few days, but I'm wondering if there's a faster way to get the key than to go through all possibilities (256*256*256*256 is a bit too much for my computer to do in a reasonable amount of time). I think from some tests I did that I'm properly undoing al...

I wrote a program to print all matches of

"is","and","answer", or "hack"

in a string that I got. It worked eventually.

I also wrote a little application. I didn't filter it (which, as I was just running a console application, made a lot of beeping noises), but it was fairly obvious when it came up through all the special characters. Although, filtering it does sound like a good idea.