My Chemical Romance

[the_impaler]

It was probably harder to make than to solve. Anyway, how hard was it ? To make it a bit more specific - if you got education more than high school level, state the subject of your study and time it took you . It's ok to brag about your education level 8)
Here is mine:
Nuclear Physics [never mind how far I got ] - a couple evenings

[gfoot]

I studied Mathematics for four years at Oxford. Doesn't help much with this challenge though! I studied Chemistry until I was 18. I guess this challenge really depends on whether you know what the periodic table is - you could pick encodings that need a deeper knowledge of the subject I guess.

[the_impaler]

Well, the challenge has extra twist - the periodic table on wikipedia is wrong, you would have to use another source. I could came up with a better cipher based on it, that's true. Here, I am just trying to get some demographics.

[sigi]

I looked at it twice. The first time, my reaction was "crypto meh I'm not going to do it anyway", but the second time I was like "if there are that many solvers it can't be THAT hard".

I took a guess judging from the title of the challenge and went straight for a periodic table, simply using the numbers as indices -- that obviously turns out very quickly to be the solution to the puzzle.

So it only took me a couple of minutes to solve (I also had to try two different periodic tables because the first that I used did not give the needed name for the 110 weight element). Had it been any harder than how it actually was, I surely would have abandoned it (maybe I would have tried reversing the sequence, but that's about it).

Oh, and I have not much more knowledge about chemistry than the average Joe. I'm software engineer by profession (MSc).

[MerickOWA]

I almost didn't get this one. The similarity to the band name threw me off for a long time. I kept thinking that perhaps the band had a song which mentioned something would help, or that a website of the band would have some online tool/game that would make clear what the numbers meant.

It wasn't until minus posted something about the chemical table of elements that I realized what the numbers meant Only took me a 10-20 minutes after that.

110 gave me some trouble tho, Some listed it as Ununnilium (which i read was Darmstadtium previous name).

I have BSS in Computer Engineering. I hated chemistery

[rmplpmpl]

This was one of the challenges that I solved pretty fast. I got the correct idea right away and didn't realise that there was another name to Darmstadtium, so solving took only about ten minutes.

I hated chemistry in school - and got by far the worst grades there.

[m!nus]

It wasn't until minus posted something about the chemical table of elements that I realized what the numbers meant Only took me a 10-20 minutes after that.

I deleted that post by therethinker's request. I just posted it because it wa not working for me that way. The reason: the german periodic table is different, didn't know that. Was pretty easy then.

[MerickOWA]

Thats interesting. I didn't think German used different symbols for the elements, I thought it was just the names.

[Marv]

Hehe.. M!nus I remembered your answer and so got the solution

I always think to complicated first -.-'

[megabreit]

Looks like one needs to evolve the ability to think outside the box. Not quite sure if I already did
Maybe it also helped that I don't know the band at all.
It took me quite long to get the idea and 20 min to find the "right" periodic table.

I studied electronics and information science, but it didn't really help here.

[mmhckb]

Bachelors, Mathematics
Masters, Computer Science

Chemistry sucks.

[jonik555]

I'm 17 years old and im at high school. it took me just time needed to convert hex to dec and to look it up in table . I knew cipher immediatelly

[chephy]

Currently studying chemistry and physics – the time it took me to type "5a 63 08 47 16 08 07 35 10 4b 6e 0a 59 13 44 10".split.map { |n| n.to_i 16 } into irb and look up the atomic number in a periodic table.

Somehow, I was sure that this cipher would be used just after I read the title at the »challenges« page; the hex encoding was also very obvious.

[Noob23]

nice challenge... easy to solve - but hard to answer, cause of the missing blank -.-

[Chnty]

I LOVED this challenge!
First I think it's a very nice way of hiding an obvious hint by usign a bands name and second it made me listent to the band a lot(didn't help me at all but I doscovered that I like it) so overall a nice challenge, though not very hard: someone just needs the right idea.