I think it unlikely you have a compute cluster that can generate 3.3 million, billion, billion, billion SHA1 hashes per second (edit: and that assumes not addin

I think it unlikely you have a compute cluster that can generate 3.3 million, billion, billion, billion SHA1 hashes per second (edit: and that assumes not adding the random 5 characters to the end). The actual contest will have a word list of a thousand words. Also, (a) you're allowed to permute case of letters, exploding the search space even more, which is handy because (b) I presume the target sha1 will come from words not on the word list, making an exact match unlikely (hence score based on hamming distance).