Slashdot Mirror
LGP Announces New Competition
Time Doctor writes "Linux Game Publishing announced its new game competition today, wherein an image relating to the game is revealed one pixel a second and competitors can attempt to be the first to guess it. Winner gets the first copy of the game, and the unofficial award of having way too much time on their hands to sit around waiting for pixels to change."
There are a few 'interesting' properties of the image that they've posted; firstly the noise doesn't appear to be randomly distributed - there are many more samples in the center of the intensity scale than in the fully dark/fully light regions. The green channel also appears to have a much broader distribution curve than the red or blue channels.
To get an idea of what might be in the image I can think of a few methods that might provide some insight; performing a low pass filter (eg. gaussian filter) and enhancing what remains with the levels control in photoshop (this should help remove the random high frequency element, but of course you also end up losing all detail in whatever image is left), or if anyone feels up to it, performing an autocorrelation of the image with itself may help (essentially using the profile of the noise in the image to figure out what parts are significant).
Of course, with only ~1.5% of the image revealed so far it's not very likely that there'll be much to see yet - it's likely that all the meaningful data has been buried in the jpeg noise..