some for loops and if statements loosely narrowed down the possibilities, though a lot.
first I made the program to print out all the different possibilities.
pain in the ass I noticed:
- first of all because the possibilities, though narrowed, were still many and for the computer to print out takes time.
- secondly because the job of scrolling through all the possibilities would make my eyes bleed.
so I made the program throw everything in a text file insted. that made my program finish 50 times faster (≈7 sec).
some cunning and the built in find/search function in the text viewer became very handy tools for the rest.
when I think about it afterwards, I could have narrowed the possibilities to almost 1 if I had tried some more criterias. but then I thought it would be a waste of my time if the characters used were some I definitely didn't think they would use.
Didactic XOR Long Cipher
I have to say, figuring this one out was an awesome experience in de-bugging the various programs I produced to tackle it, but I still cant help wondering whether there's some mathematical way of attacking the problem... anyone with a good knowledge of the topic, I'd love a PM about deriving answers by the relationship between various bytes.
For solvers, keep at it... you can find ways to solve this without gigabyte sized text files.
For solvers, keep at it... you can find ways to solve this without gigabyte sized text files.