Countdown to PDC2008: Pick Your Sessions, Build Your Agenda and Win a Trip

Posted By: Dan Fernandez | Aug 22nd, 2008 @ 3:32 PM | 54,356 Views | 12 Comments

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/
Tag: PDC08
Rating:
1
0
#Aug 31st, 2008 @ 3:20 AM
ThomasScheidegger
ThomasScheidegger
NETMaster
The solution is: 'Softwareplusservices'

I published some details on my solution in Solution-TXT, excl. C# source.
#Aug 31st, 2008 @ 6:25 AM
tfraser
tfraser

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.

#Aug 31st, 2008 @ 11:06 AM
mswanson
mswanson

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.

Microsoft Communities