Well, I found the three sentences that Jennifer said while showing the picture, really said it all There was one word in each sentence that really gave the whole thing away...
Actually Sokol, your comment with the recording as you heard it was of great help to me. It confirmed that there was another recording and the seed you listed (the 5th perfect number) also confirmed for me that "perfect numbers" were used. Thanks.
If I get an XL sized T-Shirt I could probably spare you the right arm
IF YOU WANT TO SOLVE THE PUZZLE ON YOUR OWN THEN PLEASE COVER YOUR MONITOR NOW!
The message in the audio file talks about "nothing left to chance", "seed", "ordering samples from the entire collection" and the importance of "the correct seed" being a "perfect number".
The .wav audio file is (like all other such files) made up of a header followed by samples, the actual values of the audio. When combining this together a solution comes to mind of picking samples randomly from the whole list of samples, but starting with
some seed of a "perfect number". A further hint for this solution was a remark Mike made, that his friend in the .NET Framework team was behind all this, this could mean that the Random class of the .NET framework could be used for generating the random numbers.
I wrote some C# code to do actually that:
using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.IO;
namespace PDCPuzzle {
class Program { private const int SEED = SOME_PERFECT_NUMBER;
static void Main(string[] args) { // Read the whole input file in memory byte[] audio = File.ReadAllBytes("audio.wav"); // Create a new buffer for the output file byte [] output = new byte [audio.Length]; // Copy the WAV header from the input file to the output buffer for(int n=0;n<44;n++) output[n] = audio[n]; // Seed the random number generator with the correct seed Random rand = new Random(SEED); // Iterate through all samples for (int n = 44; n < audio.Length; n+=2) { // Select a random sample (each sample is 2 bytes long) int hit = rand.Next((audio.Length - 44)/2); // Copy the sample to the next sample slot in the output file output[n] = audio[44+2*hit]; output[n+1] = audio[45 + 2 * hit]; } // Write the output file File.WriteAllBytes("audioout.wav", output); } } }
Now we only need to pick the value of the seed, preferably a perfect number.
As tfraser pointed out in the comments, there is a mathematical concept of a
perfect number. There are only 5 such numbers that can be represented by Int32 (which is the type of the seed parameter to the Random class constructor). When we use the 5th perfect number (33550336) as a seed we get a new audio message. This message says:
"Hello, you have reached Carol's number, thats C A R O L. I am currently unavailable please try again using one of my other numbers"
Well since the perfect number was a mathematically defined number, is there perhaps something called a Carol Number? Yes
indeed there is, and one of them, 1046527, yields a (somewhat better quality) audio file that asks the question: "What's the name of our PDC 2008 marketing manager?"
Countdown to PDC2008: Technical Fellow John Shewchuk Talks About His Talk at PDC2008
Sep 15, 2008 at 1:27 AMCountdown to PDC2008: Technical Fellow John Shewchuk Talks About His Talk at PDC2008
Sep 14, 2008 at 3:18 PMCountdown to PDC2008: Secrets Revealed
Sep 08, 2008 at 8:07 AMIf I get an XL sized T-Shirt I could probably spare you the right arm
Countdown to PDC2008: Secrets Revealed
Sep 05, 2008 at 6:32 PMIF YOU WANT TO SOLVE THE PUZZLE ON YOUR OWN THEN PLEASE COVER YOUR MONITOR NOW!
The message in the audio file talks about "nothing left to chance", "seed", "ordering samples from the entire collection" and the importance of "the correct seed" being a "perfect number".
The .wav audio file is (like all other such files) made up of a header followed by samples, the actual values of the audio. When combining this together a solution comes to mind of picking samples randomly from the whole list of samples, but starting with some seed of a "perfect number". A further hint for this solution was a remark Mike made, that his friend in the .NET Framework team was behind all this, this could mean that the Random class of the .NET framework could be used for generating the random numbers. I wrote some C# code to do actually that:
Now we only need to pick the value of the seed, preferably a perfect number.
As tfraser pointed out in the comments, there is a mathematical concept of a perfect number.
There are only 5 such numbers that can be represented by Int32 (which is the type of the seed parameter to the Random class constructor). When we use the 5th perfect number (33550336) as a seed we get a new audio message. This message says:
"Hello, you have reached Carol's number, thats C A R O L. I am currently unavailable please try again using one of my other numbers"
Well since the perfect number was a mathematically defined number, is there perhaps something called a Carol Number? Yes indeed there is, and one of them, 1046527, yields a (somewhat better quality) audio file that asks the question: "What's the name of our PDC 2008 marketing manager?"
Countdown to PDC2008: Secrets Revealed
Sep 05, 2008 at 5:26 PMCountdown to PDC2008: Secrets Revealed
Sep 05, 2008 at 5:25 PM