Countdown to PDC2008: Pick Your Sessions, Build Your Agenda and Win a Trip
- Posted: Aug 22, 2008 at 3:32 PM
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In this week’s edition of the PDC Countdown (only 66 days to go), Mike and Jennifer host the marketing manager of the conference who talks about all of the great opportunities to
win, win, win! Trips to LA, tickets to the Dodgers or Lakers, a movie premiere, or a trip down the red carpet at the Emmy’s could be yours. Or you could design the PDC t-shirt that will be handed
out to thousands of attendees!! Wow, you could go down in PDC history if you’re the winner! Plus, I suppose we also need to talk about content and sessions . . . . so in a double whammy line-up, the creative director of the PDC appears on the show to discuss
the new Agenda Builder and My Sessions user experience on the PDC web site. So much to talk about, so little time! And there’s also Mike’s Hard Hat Challenge – can you solve it in 6 hours
or less? On your marks, get set, go!
http://www.microsoftpdc.com/
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I'm excited to see how our viewers attack this week's Hard Hat Challenge. I've dialed-up the difficulty level a bit in the hopes that it might take longer than 6 hours to solve. But, it is a challenge, and if someone solves it within 6 hours, I'll be seriously impressed. I hope I didn't make it too difficult.
Good luck!
My answer: THE TRANSISTOR
DukeNukem...this isn't something that anyone is likely to guess, and no, that is not the correct answer. It is more difficult than the prior challenges, and I'll be very interested to hear how the eventual winner solved it.
I'd love to go to the PDC! But I don't have a few grand to blow. (Wife would kill me!)
Microsoft, how about some giveaway trips to the PDC?
In the 1950's the transistor was invented, and the binary code with the least value is the group on the right. But I don't seem to be able to decode it propperly.
It isn't brialle nor Morse-code. Binary doesn't seem to give me anything readable either.
So I gave up and made a guess
Actually, Mike's Hard Hat Challenge doesn't require PDC registration. Anybody can give it a go and win the limited edition PDC2008 shirt. Go ahead, give it a whirl. Mike's upped the ante to see who can guess his riddle this time.
Good luck!
Ritzy
DON'T READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT A FEW HINTS
Here are a few hints that might push some of you in the right direction:
I hope this helps!
I have worked out how to solve the problem. I do not have the solution yet but I'm very close and will post it as soon as I am finished.
Edit 1: It turns out I was on the right track but was beaten to the final solution. Continue reading the thread for further clarification.
I published some details on my solution in Solution-TXT, excl. C# source.
If anyone has not yet solved the problem and would like to do so without external input then do not read this post as it contains some discussion of the method used to obtain the solution.
ThomasScheidegger, having read your solution I am very impressed. I too started to work on it after reading the additional hints posted and quickly recognised the use of Huffman coding in the problem (the mention of 'a paper from 1952' really gave this part away). I also assumed that Wingdings had been used to mask the characters used in the message (admittedly, this was a guess).
Contrary to your method however, I attempted to manually draw the Huffman tree and it's here were it all went horribly wrong for me. With the tree that I obtained the binary code did not lead me to the first message that you received from your program, and therefore I also did not get the second message and ultimate solution.
I really thought I had it solved when I realised the link between the Huffman coding, the Wingdings obfuscation and the binary, hence the earlier post that I made out of sheer excitement. Well done mswanson on creating such a difficult problem. You should refer it to Microsoft's human resources department as an interview question for potential employees.
ThomasScheidegger...I am seriously impressed! I dialed this one up pretty high, and I wondered if someone would be able to decode it. You have earned some major geek points in my book. Thanks for posting your solution...I enjoyed reading it. Of the Challenges posted so far, this is easily the most difficult. Please send us an e-mail at pdccount (at) microsoft.com, and we'll coordinate your very limited edition internal PDC2008 t-shirt.
If you're curious, I took a photo of the manual Huffman coding tree I created a few nights back to ensure I hadn't made a mistake. Leaf nodes can be identified with a character on top and the frequency on the bottom.
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