5 ms·

What about.. "You may permute capitalization for the dictionary words (i.e. you may use Ruby, rUby, RUBY, and RUBy)"

• brown9-2 17y ago
  Forgot to consider that; along with the fact that the 5 random characters can be any printable ASCII characters, not just alphanumeric. So this is somewhere upwards of 10^50 phrases to hash (in a naive implementation), right?
  • sophacles 17y ago
    Well, are you also including the fact that there is nothing forbidding repeated words?
    • jcl 17y ago
      While this has a marginal effect on the total number of possible hashes, repeated words are still an important consideration: If you can guess even one word that is likely to appear in their 1000-word dictionary, you can precompute the hashes for all possible variants of the corresponding phrase (that word repeated twelve times) prior to the contest, giving you a jump on other contestants. I'd guess that we'll either see the rules revised to prevent this or see a dictionary filled with non-dictionary words.