3 ms·
The count-the-pixels thing is too obvious, and doesn't explain why this is a compressed png that's almost twice the size of what you get when you decompress it.
by burke 10y ago
The count-the-pixels thing is too obvious, and doesn't explain why this is a compressed png that's almost twice the size of what you get when you decompress it.
"'Twould be a shame not to count this art among the great texts of our time" makes me think part of the file is a one-time pad against part of some famous book (based on the phrasing, and the Britishness of MI5, probably some 19th century British literary author, maybe Dickens or Austen). Assuming that's the case, the solution would be:
1. Figure out which 'text' they're referring to, or get the text of as many books as possible;
2. Take the chunk of the file between the PNG headers and the Comment;
3. XOR that chunk against the corpus with a sliding window;
4. Score each sample based on number of english words found in the output, keeping the top 10 as you go (or do some map/reduce crap because this would take a while);
5. Read the top outputs and see if anything makes sense.
This would also explain why the file is a bit longer than you'd think it should be based on its visual contents.
If anyone wants to try it, this might be a good start:
* https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/37 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/37
* https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/68 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/68
- estefan 10y agoIt does seem too obvious, and the comment seems to be pointing somewhere else like you say. What do you mean about the compressed size? There are no hidden chunks in the file, and the image data chunk when inflated is 60147 bytes, vs 1270 compressed.
- burke 10y agoI ran `convert -compress None puzzle.png` and the output was ~800 bytes. Clearly that's optimizing the image too, but basically the image seems wastefully large, and that makes me suspicious there's something going on there.