Warning and General Info
This is a puzzle intended for people with a decent amount of computer science knowledge. You’ve been warned! Specifically, this is a recruiting puzzle by a cool company called ITA Software. You may have heard something about Google’s attempts to buy them (usually a pretty good indicator of awesome levels). Speaking of Google, they actually did something similar back in 2004.

Spoilers below!

Phase One

If you look through the source you’ll see there’s nothing abnormal. The only interesting bit is the Google Analytics code at the bottom, but it’s standard. To tackle this section you’ll need to inspect the HTTP response headers. If you’re using Chrome you can do this by opening up your Developer Tools.

Specifically, you’re going to want to look at the X-Encode value. Seems odd, doesn’t it? Well, ctrl v it into your favorite base64 decoder to reveal a link to phase two.

Example X-Encode: aHR0cDovL3d3dy5vaGFpcHV6emxlLmNvbS8/NjB lMTg3ODgtMjgwZC00NmM3LTliMjYtZmNhYTZkMjU0MjMz

Example X-Decode: http://www.ohaipuzzle.com/?60e18788-280d-46c7-9b26-fcaa6d254233

Phase Two

And now the hard part. Let’s tackle the letter block first. 26 by 11 letters. 26. Letters in the alphabet, alright. 11. Why 11? What else is 11? FIND THE WORD. Ahhhh, alright. Let’s take the Fth (6th) letter of the first row, the Ith letter of the second, etc. There’s a couple different ways you can solve this. You can either do it manually (just make sure your count is correct) or you can write a script to solve it if you really want.

In this particular case we get the following: ANCHORCHIPS. What you get will vary as the letter block is different per person.

So, now we have the WORD. Next up, the UUID. By now you may have noticed the formatting of the url, handily providing our UUID. Our’s is 60e18788-280d-46c7-9b26-fcaa6d254233.

822-6. Honestly this one took quite a while to figure out. The key is in realizing that the formatting suggests a section of some document. Specifically RFC822: Standard for ARPA Internet Text Messages. Section 6 just happens to be Address Specification (specifically: email addresses).

With this in hand we now know that we need to give OHaiPuzzle the WORD we solved for, the UUID from our url, and our email address. The key for doing that is in the last part of the clue. 2616-9.5. Running with the way we solved the last clue, we discover that 2616-9.5 is the section for POST.

All we need to do is fire off a POST request. Excellent.

curl -d "WORD=ANCHORCHIPS&UUID=60e18788-280d-46c7-9b26-fcaa6d254233&EMAIL=YOU@DOMAIN.COM" http://www.ohaipuzzle.com

If you formatted everything correctly then you should get a response back congratulating you on completing the puzzle, giving you your place, and then revealing that the puzzle was sponsored by ITA Software. Then, a couple weeks later, a package might appear at your doorstep.

There you go, everything you need to know about the O Hai Puzzle. Twas fun, wouldn’t you say?

Current Stats for Solving Team
30,000+ people tried to complete ohaipuzzle.
152 completed ohaipuzzle
We placed 3rd

Dropbox then ran a dropquest
140k people completed the dropquest
We placed in the top 100

Every year MIT holds an event known as the TechFair. It’s pretty much like a Career Fair, except instead of everyone dressing up in suits and passing out resumes; everyone dresses up in jeans, has really awesome conversations about the latest and greatest tech in the field, and occasionally a resume is passed. This year, however, Facebook decided to sponsor an all-night hack-a-thon the night before the TechFair. The idea of a hack-a-thon is simple: bring an idea (hardware or software) that you’ve never worked on before, grab a team (up to 4), and then build it. You have from 10pm to 8am to implement your idea. In the morning, you will be given the chance to demo your idea and Facebook Engineers will judge the product based on your idea and execution.

It could be theorized that Facebook held the event to a) evaluate potential hires and b) ensure that the 100+ Course 6 (CS) people that participated were too exhausted the next day to make sense when attempting to talk with other companies. However, my thinking went something like this: “an excuse to pursue one of the many project ideas that fills the moleskine on my desk? Sold!”

I spent some time going through my ideas, and decided on a more recent one. It had a simple premise, addressed a real annoyance in my life, and seemed completely feasible to finish a set of core deliverables in one night.

Let’s set the stage…

The Pitch: Social Networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc) seem to have taken on the stance that your life is now, and now only. This real time approach is very much their core mission, but they’re pursuing it at the expense of our past. And by past I could mean 5 years or 5 hours. Twitter let’s us search the world, but not our own social graph. Facebook does, but only within the immediate past. Echo Chamber is a project to bring true search to your own social graph. Find the cool video you saw in your news feed last week or the tweet to a WIRED article from 2 years ago. Why exactly isn’t this already implemented? Now, take it a step further, visualize your social graph’s interest in certain topics over time. Curious what your friends thought of Inception? Well, now you can easily find out.

I really have no idea why this functionality doesn’t already exist, beyond hypothetical technical issues. Many business applications for monitoring a company’s brand through various social media channels have similar such tools, but none of them target the problem for the normal user.

So, that was the challenge. Build a web app that would allow a user to easily search their own social graph. I decided to go with Twitter for phase 0 as I had a decent amount of familiarity with their API, and focused on the search component, leaving the data visualization piece for later. I also decided to go as a one-man team, to add an additional level of challenge.

The Technical: Python + Django + Elixir/sqlalchemy to interface with SQL + Tweepy to interface with Twitter.

The Results:

Core deliverables: met! It definitely needs a good amount of work before it can be released in the wild, but I have to say that it came together amazingly well, given I hadn’t even installed/setup my server environment before arriving.

Out of the 100+ original hackers, 17 teams completed and submitted their projects. After the judging I managed to walk away with two awards: Runner Up and the Highlander Award (for being the only one-man team to finish).

The Fuel: Two cans of coke, a vitamin water, good music, and 2 twenty-minute naps were all that was needed to make it to morning and on to 10pm the next night. Why so late? Well, as a rule of thumb, never say no when Google offers to take you out to dinner…

Lessons: Next year, I will definitely be going with a good team. It was a blast going solo, but it was also a massive crunch to complete each of the core components necessary for the demo. With a team we could have gone beyond the core, adding features and polish – positioning Echo Chamber in direct competition with the first place team of three.

But hey, it was a lot of fun, and that’s what matters.

My original plan was to stitch the three days worth of videos together, and edit them a little. However, the time to do so has not presented itself since starting classes, research, and the like. So, for now, I will simply post the raw footage.

Welcome to the glowing not-quite-phone future.

Let’s take a look.

There is now a concrete platform sitting between the Library, Magruder, and the SUB. Expect an awesome sculpture to mysteriously appear in the coming months.

Ryle Hall renovations continue. The first picture shows a few of the new bike racks that now line sit in front of the building. The second shows one of the outdoor balcony area.

The Pershing expansion seems to be moving along nicely.

Passing the DPS building I noticed a sign on the door. Pretty sure this happened last semester, but the move to Grim Smith seems complete. Both the DPS building and a wing of the Grim-Smith Hospital (the one pictured below) are scheduled to be demolished.

Starting this fall all on-campus students will receive a new id card. These are necessary for the implementation of the Perimeter Access System (which you can read about here). Managing to get ahold of one of these cards I was curious how they could practically be used. To open a door you must bring the id up to the small black box above the handle. In practice it would seem like you have to get it within an inch for the door to unlock.

The good news is that this means you should be fine leaving it in your wallet and just tapping your wallet against the box. The bad news is that with the box above the handle I don’t see how you would be able to open the door without taking your id out of your pocket.

And thus the exploration was complete and it was time to drive back to Kansas City.