Playing with the full DEC

Discussion of challenges you have already solved
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urmemoris
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Oct 09, 2013 7:41 pm

Playing with the full DEC

Post by urmemoris »

Couldn't figure out the solution for a long time. But after a while I looked at the challenge with the fresh eyes! Based on the fact that every number starts with 00 01 or 02, I made a decision that numbers are independent (at least you probably shouldn't concatenate encoded ones), and started to search for some wierd 36bit systems on the web.

So with 'DEC' and '36bit' as the keywords, Radix-50 character encoding was something I found worth to check. Got 30,18,15,0 for the first number. My first assumption that it is "THE " was correct and I was happy so solve that just looking for A.K. on the book wiki page.

Still, found out that there are exist lots (ok, more that one is a lot) character sets for 40-character Radix-50 tables, so you should either guess correct shift for characters or find the right one.

Actually loved this encoding principle, as it packs non-(2^n) data pretty well. :o

After solving a challenge i'm surprised how few people succeeded!
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Hippo
Posts: 339
Joined: Sat Feb 01, 2014 12:05 am
Location: Praha 5

Re: Playing with the full DEC

Post by Hippo »

urmemoris wrote: After solving a challenge i'm surprised how few people succeeded!
After seeing your hint, googling DEC computers encodding ... lead to Radix 50 wiki page ... what actually contained 40 characters in correct order. ... so this is why one more succeded.
djcomidi
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat Mar 20, 2010 5:43 pm

Post by djcomidi »

While researching this challenge I stumbled on this url :
http://rabbit.eng.miami.edu/info/decchars.html
Especially the last 2 sections were interesting/helpful.
After that I engaged my google-fu and here I am 8)

ADMINS HELP !!!
I accidentally made this post in the not-solved thread, but I am unable to delete or edit that post.
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