hacker.org

I am now at stage two . Should i know consider the number in quotes or are the quotes part of the number?

Answering that question is part of the fun ...

well i had a minor mistake, i forgot to include the very last 75 . Without that mistake it would have been crystal clear. Thanks to laz0r for helping me out!

Hm... I had no idea so far how to approach this challenge? Any hints?

It's a number, so what do you normally do with numbers?

That's a quite general hint Most of the time at hacker.org you convert one number into another representation e.g. into hex or binary and then interpret things differently. I don't know of a format for such long floating point numbers.

It was meant to be general if it were an integer, it would be obvious what to do - so treat it mathematically in *exactly* the same way - see if that helps!

laz0r wrote:It was meant to be general if it were an integer, it would be obvious what to do - so treat it mathematically in *exactly* the same way - see if that helps!

Any relationship with Number Theory?

MatRush wrote: Any relationship with Number Theory?

No, not really. Try reading about different compression algorithms. Maybe one of them will give you a sufficient hint to understand what to do for the first phase.

My first try worked . I was solving it in debug mode expecting some of my assumptions would fail, but there was no problem at all.

Good one, finally got it.