I like little puzzles so I gave it a shot in Ruby. #!/usr/bin/ruby require 'digest' charmap = %w{zero one two three four five six seven eight nine

I like little puzzles so I gave it a shot in Ruby. #!/usr/bin/ruby require 'digest' charmap = %w{zero one two three four five six seven eight nine a b c d e f} (0..0xf).map do |prefix| Process.fork do (0..0xffffff).each do |i| hex = "%01x%06x" % [prefix, i] # "0123456" digit_words = hex.chars.map { |c| charmap[c.to_i(16)] } # ["zero", "one", ...] sentence = "The SHA256 for this sentence begins with: %s, %s, %s, %s, %s, %s and %s." % digit_words sha = Digest::SHA256.hexdigest(sentence) if sha[0,7] == hex puts(sentence) end end end end Process.waitall 8 minutes on an old quad-core. I don't expect there's much to optimize since all the heavy lifting is in the libraries. I didn't bother with synchronization so you might get a scrambled result if it somehow finds a flurry of hits. :)