Re:Some math about the Engineyard contest
by profquail on Friday July 17, 2009 @11:55AM
(#710143)
I'm going to try to crank out a little program to work on this over the weekend (what's the worst that could happen, I wasted a couple of hours?).
Unless you have some really serious hardware at your disposal, or you have a good knowledge of how to attack the SHA-1 hash algorithm, the best bet is going to be to just have the computer try random combinations of the words with various capitalizations (plus the extra couple of letters you're allowed to put at the end). Best case scenario, you get lucky and happen to find a fairly well-scoring string that you can submit.
Unless you have some really serious hardware at your disposal, or you have a good knowledge of how to attack the SHA-1 hash algorithm, the best bet is going to be to just have the computer try random combinations of the words with various capitalizations (plus the extra couple of letters you're allowed to put at the end). Best case scenario, you get lucky and happen to find a fairly well-scoring string that you can submit.