Blizzard

MagneticMonopole · Post by **MagneticMonopole** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 7:23 pm

Anyone who would like to talk about the Blizzard challenge?
I sincerely hope it is ok to mention things that do not work. For me, that includes:

- interpreting the black and white pixels as a bit stream of 7-bit or 8-bit ascii characters, be it lsb or msb first, be black "1" and white "0" or vice versa

- xoring the bitmap over itself, with any horizontal, vertical or combined offset (C is so much faster than perl)

- interpreting the 415x329 pixels as 83x47 fields of 5x7 pixels, each of which would present the statically encoded bitmap of a single character. This seems to be not the case, as there are 3901 different bit patterns in the 3901 fields.

- looking hard at the PNG file itself. It seems to be clean. No message in the comment, no additional data after the END chunk, nothing.

- googling "blizzard code", which always returns to cheat codes for world of warcraft.

- superimposing horizontal stripes of 7 or 47 pixels (and vertical stripes of 5 or 83 pixels) and xoring the bits

I am still suspicious of the somewhat unusual image dimensions. 415=5 * 83, 329 = 7 * 47, both products of only two primes. Coincidence? Any other idea about what to do with 5x7 subfields?

This seems to be a rather old challenge (number 56!), so I know you have at least tried.
Pray tell us:

What did you do?

gfoot · Post by **gfoot** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 9:35 pm

I tried various stride adjustments as well, to no avail, but I might not have tried hard enough. It's been solved by a good handful of people though so it must be fairly accessible. That said, it took six months before it was solved.

Broker · Post by **Broker** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 9:48 pm

Let´s add one additional try that did no work:

It´s not an ASCII-Art-Challenge.

MerickOWA · Post by **MerickOWA** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 4:33 pm

This was a pretty fun challenge. Its method of "encryption" is not complicated. Theres no complicated dictionary/key/ or other external information needed.

MagneticMonopole · Post by **MagneticMonopole** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 5:19 pm

MerickOWA wrote:This was a pretty fun challenge. Its method of "encryption" is not complicated. Theres no complicated dictionary/key/ or other external information needed.

Sigh. That is what I feared most.

gfoot · Post by **gfoot** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 7:20 pm

I actually solved it last night, finally.

Something that was revealing for me was applying randomness tests to the data. Hopefully that's not too specific a hint.

teebee · Post by **teebee** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 9:41 pm

The hints given in this discussion are sufficient as I could determine just now...

horst · Post by **horst** » Tue Apr 14, 2009 3:34 pm

Not for me

Changing the width/height doesn't seem to be the trick

horst · Post by **horst** » Thu Apr 23, 2009 3:28 pm

*bump*

redcrown · Post by **redcrown** » Wed Jun 23, 2010 2:41 am

I tried interpreting groups of ff ff ff or 00 00 00 (it seems like black and white pixels come in groups of 3) in the file when viewed in a hex editor as either 0 or 1 bits but no luck. Any hints?

Kikifax · Post by **Kikifax** » Tue Mar 15, 2011 7:38 pm

Did anyone try the Game of Life?

I'm too lazy to actually try it out,
so I thought I'd post it and see if it gets removed.

ShadowWidow · Post by **ShadowWidow** » Thu Sep 22, 2011 6:48 pm

Its not a Game of Life state.
But nice try

compudemon · Post by **compudemon** » Thu Sep 29, 2011 6:10 am

someone hinted there is no key, but if 1=a, 2=b, 3=c ... that is still a key of a sort even if a simple one. the binary data represented by the 2 color image, i double checked there is no 01 or fe intensity colors hiding a faint image

though the binary might still make an image of some sort with no key. right now i am looking for 7 bit per character words with a simple direct coding of a=97... so far no luck

dangermouse · Post by **dangermouse** » Mon Apr 23, 2012 8:45 am

Following gfoot hint i found an asymmetry in the image. Still I can't find how to decode it. Do you know if the whole picture contains data, or if most of the picture is white noise and only a part of it contains the answer?

meis · Post by **meis** » Tue Apr 30, 2013 7:30 pm

I thought the image could not only be an image, i opened w/ VLC, i converted to a zip, i looked at it in the notepad, maybe in the code of the image there was a "your answer is: blahblahblah"... but nothing...