hacker.org

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

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

MerickOWA wrote: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.

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

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

I always think to complicated first -.-'

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.

Bachelors, Mathematics
Masters, Computer Science

Chemistry sucks.

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

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.

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

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.