It seems like Google has posted this banner at MIT hoping that some students would be able to decrypt the message and call a telephone number hidden in the code. According to Techcrunch, none has called yet. Then the Techcrunch readers took over trying to solve the problem with the added incentive of a Techcruch t-shirt. The most obvious one is counting the number of characters for each word which will give you this number: 617-274-866X. People theorized that “X” should be “0″ (IMHO, Google is not dumb. If the last digit was 0, there would have been 1-2 spaces after the last character J) and called that number. The funny part is that some other organization is taking advantage of the Google banner and doing recruiting of their own (I rate them higher than Google – is that Microsoft or Yahoo?): “Congratulations, you have solved the second more difficult problem. Unfortunately we have to confess we are not with Google Jobs…. Leave us your name and number, you won’t regret it.”
Then 2 readers named Scott Kyle and Hakan did a simple substitution cipher. Scott thought the word “Congratulations” is hidden in the message and Hakan found “Jobs” revealing:
0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
456789ABCDE2FGHIJKL0MNOP1QRS3TUVWXYZ
“Congratulations Keep Searching or Call 617-639-0570 x10″ .
Most importantly, my question is: Why none of the students responded back? Is Google losing its luster? Are people getting tired of this elitism culture propounded by the web giant? OR the economy has bounced back from recession, the students already have multiple job offers and are too lazy to solve a riddle?
According to one of the MIT students:
“As an MIT student in EECS, I found the sign/flier annoying. Why would I waste my time? If someone wanted to crack the code and could, then he should could also create technology to bring down Google. It only takes one person to create disruptive technology. What makes G so great that they can pick and choose with an obnoxious flier that doesn’t even guarantee a job. (you “may” have job with G). Therefore, even though it was intended as a kind of ‘challenge’, I found it to be pretentious, and hard to respect the lack of effort than went into it.”
Anyway in the spirit of puzzles, this is one of the most hardest puzzle to solve, created by Raymond Smullyan:
“Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are ‘da’ and ‘ja’, in some order. You do not know which word means which.”
Filed under: technology, Google, MIT, puzzle
I followed this thing as it unfolded; before the true answer was submitted everyone completely believed in the first answer and that the whole thing was a hoax from some marketing group. Since we now know that wasn’t the case…. How on earth some entity got hold of the first (incorrect) number so quickly anticipating so many of the wrong answers was, to me, some true brilliance.
[...] so it really was Google. Stu found this terrific blog post from Raj Sarkar that laid the whole thing [...]
My name is Piter Jankovich. oOnly want to tell, that your blog is really cool
And want to ask you: is this blog your hobby?
P.S. Sorry for my bad english
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