hacker.org

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.

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.