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Is there a nice way to go along the path? I thought doding it with the mouse would be the easiest/fastest, but actually it's pretty hard to stay on the trail. Hints?

First I GIMPed it so that there were only 3 colors: from there I did it all programatically.

Using the mouse to trace the path sounds pretty interesting. Good luck with that.

Another idea I just came up with (more importantly for lazy bits) would be to have the kind people at mechanical turk do it for you

Don't bother tracing it with the mouse. It will be hard work (actually harder than to code it). <deleted spoiler>

<deleted spoiler/>

Where can I find this challenge on the map?

Efe, don't worry, you'll find it soon.

By the way, I think we *** ****** **** *** *** ******, ** ***** *** **** *** ****** **** ******, because ** *** ****** *** ** ***** **.

EDIT: Deleted spoiler.

Oh, sorry ... of course you're right, tails! Just deleted that spoiler.

You deleted the spoiler too late

I already guessed the image URL's.

Whats the problem with writing the names of the challenges? You can easily get them, when you are logged in.

Would any of the solvers be so kind to reveal the exact numbers of bits in this spiral?

I don't think that this would spoil the challenge too much but my solver program is quite close to the right number I think and I want to know how close I am.

Thanks in advance!

I had my solver leave breadcrumbs of where it had been on the image, which it would then save so I could see how it was doing.

Thank you for the answer, but I see already where exactly my program goes...
And I went once through the whole marked spiral (and I went very fast through it and it took me half a day already and I missed many mistakes).

So my initial question stays the same - could anyone tell me the exact number of bits in this spiral?

8360

therethinker wrote:I had my solver leave breadcrumbs of where it had been on the image, which it would then save so I could see how it was doing.

haha, that's what I did

I'm a bit surprised by the long streaks of pixels of the same (green-ish) color. No matter whether you interpret them as ones or as zeros, that doesn't make for good ASCII code

It does not *have* to be ASCII, of course - but seeing how the challenge here is getting the data at all rather than decoding it, that would have been my first assumption.

I found the encoding easily by doing the first 3-4 bytes by hand.