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I'm sure you've got your own ideas for your CTFs, but if you haven't heard of them before I would recommend you check out the Matasano Crypto Challenges (crypto

I'm sure you've got your own ideas for your CTFs, but if you haven't heard of them before I would recommend you check out the Matasano Crypto Challenges (cryptopals.com). They ran them privately for awhile, you just emailed them and said you wanted in and they sent you the challenges, once you emailed the answers for one batch they gave you another, etc. I've tried various 'code gaming' things before, and the Matasano challenges were, in my opinion, the best ones I've come across. (I am exempting things like Stepic's bioinformatics challenges since their main goal is to expand your knowledge of bioinformatics rather than of programming, though they do get into some advanced data structures later on)

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147 12y ago
The founders of Starfighter were the founders of Matasano.
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tptacek 12y ago
We wrote the Matasano Crypto Challenges. Besides cryptography, what are some other programming problem domains you'd enjoy playing with? We're particularly interested in problem domains that are hard for ordinary programmers to pick up on a whim. We want to make it possible to seriously engage with interesting problems while in your couch with the Daily Show running in the background.
- nulltype 12y ago
  I guess what sort of domains do people like to play around with in their own time? For games there's 3d rendering, physics and AI which seem fun (at least to me) but I'm not sure how to necessarily make fun challenges out of them. For non-direct-games things fancier AI like deep learning, audio synthesis, making compilers/parsers/transpilers, math stuff like project euler, puzzle/board game solvers/bots (https://gist.github.com/christopherhesse/51e9baf0e3d440d8afff https://gist.github.com/christopherhesse/51e9baf0e3d440d8aff...) come to mind. Some of the stuff in the 3rd stripe CTF was pretty interesting like making a search engine or dealing with distributed system consensus problems (raft). Maybe using the coolest new framework is fun for some people, like a challenge could involve angular.js so you could get some experience using it without having to go full-on side project or put it in at work without having any real idea if you should. Implementing things that you are familiar with but that you don't understand the internals of has been fun for me in the past (for instance like https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2015-02-20-lets-build-synchronized.html https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2015-02-20-lets-bui...). Maybe you always wondered how this thing works, and now you can figure it out and solve this challenge at the same time.
chernevik 12y ago
That looks like fun. Thanks for pointing it out -- and thanks, tpacek et al for producing it.

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147 12y ago

The founders of Starfighter were the founders of Matasano.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

tptacek 12y ago

We wrote the Matasano Crypto Challenges. Besides cryptography, what are some other programming problem domains you'd enjoy playing with? We're particularly interested in problem domains that are hard for ordinary programmers to pick up on a whim. We want to make it possible to seriously engage with interesting problems while in your couch with the Daily Show running in the background.

nulltype 12y ago
I guess what sort of domains do people like to play around with in their own time? For games there's 3d rendering, physics and AI which seem fun (at least to me) but I'm not sure how to necessarily make fun challenges out of them. For non-direct-games things fancier AI like deep learning, audio synthesis, making compilers/parsers/transpilers, math stuff like project euler, puzzle/board game solvers/bots (https://gist.github.com/christopherhesse/51e9baf0e3d440d8afff https://gist.github.com/christopherhesse/51e9baf0e3d440d8aff...) come to mind. Some of the stuff in the 3rd stripe CTF was pretty interesting like making a search engine or dealing with distributed system consensus problems (raft). Maybe using the coolest new framework is fun for some people, like a challenge could involve angular.js so you could get some experience using it without having to go full-on side project or put it in at work without having any real idea if you should. Implementing things that you are familiar with but that you don't understand the internals of has been fun for me in the past (for instance like https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2015-02-20-lets-build-synchronized.html https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2015-02-20-lets-bui...). Maybe you always wondered how this thing works, and now you can figure it out and solve this challenge at the same time.

chernevik 12y ago

That looks like fun. Thanks for pointing it out -- and thanks, tpacek et al for producing it.