Re:Engine Yard Programming Contest - Win an iPhone 3GS PLUS ...
by sophacles on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @03:12PM
(#704382)
Well, are you also including the fact that there is nothing forbidding repeated words?
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Engine Yard Programming Contest - Win an iPhone 3GS PLUS ...
by jcl on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @04:07PM
(#704499)
While this has a marginal effect on the total number of possible hashes, repeated words are still an important consideration: If you can guess even one word that is likely to appear in their 1000-word dictionary, you can precompute the hashes for all possible variants of the corresponding phrase (that word repeated twelve times) prior to the contest, giving you a jump on other contestants.
I'd guess that we'll either see the rules revised to prevent this or see a dictionary filled with non-dictionary words.