4 ms·

I'm not really surprised. This is exactly why I thought the contest was kinda lame.

• profquail 17y ago
  What weren't you really surprised about? That the team who won had an expert in cryptography on their team? The guys from the CUDA forum (one of whom got TWO scores of 31, vs. this team's 30) wrote their software in a couple of days, and are not experts in cryptography. If anything, I was happy to see that CUDA (and a few ATI Stream entries) made such a big impact in this contest. Short of using a massive CPU cluster, no one really had much of a chance without it (expert or not).
  • eugenejen 17y ago
    Not only expert in Cryptography but also math progidy, Bo-Yin Yang was a mathematics prodigy in Taiwan. The competition is just best for people who already good at problem solving in the domain.
    • brown9-2 17y ago
      Isn't that true of most competitions?
    • Periodic 17y ago
      I'm not really sure what you mean about best at solving problems in this domain. This was a brute force problem, so the only real skill was in making it as fast as possible. I don't think it was any secret techniques, but rather that they happened to be a group sitting on the right tools at the right time and with a little bit of luck. You can't infer after the fact that it was their genius and domain knowledge that gave them the win, for I'm sure there were many other groups with geniuses and domain knowledge that didn't win, as well as some without the domain knowledge that just didn't get as lucky.