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ChromeOS Laptop-Smashing Ad Equation Solved
An anonymous reader writes "Google's latest marketing video for Chrome OS is interesting to watch for the laptop-smashing amateurs or the slow motion fans, but the real fun may be at 2:24 in the video where a X=G/(CHROM-3) equation is displayed on a chalkboard. Only 20 hours later, it has already been cracked by Jamendo founder Sylvain Zimmer and his team. They posted details on how they did it and won a Cr-48 netbook, which may not even be delivered because they are not in the US."
And most other people are missing something as well.
No, apparently something else is missing since the "solution" was to convert the digits to letters and go to the matching goo.gl url.
Not all of it is high school calc. IIRC the integral of 4sin(x)/x has to be solved with Taylor series, and I only got those in the second semester of university calculus. One then has to take the limit to infinity of the resulting series, which may or may not be doable for a high school kid (not sure how hard the limit is; I'm too lazy to solve / look up the series)
SSC
This has become the de-facto standard for e-puzzles these days. Step 1 - provide puzzle that results in very large number of some kind. Step 2 - have some kind of splitting and/or decoding step that's somewhat obvious that will convert the result to text. Step 3 - set up url, award prize of some kind to first N visitors. It's old and worn down, I would've expected better.
It's old and worn down, I would've expected better.
IOW: you didn't win, so you deride the contest rather than congratulate the winner.
Here's what the whole thing looks like in Wolfram Alpha all at once: (9*10^4+3^4+10)/100/((2^8-10+4*6!+17^4+11!/5+integ(3x^5,x,1,9))(2*23^6-((2^28+4)/10-(22^4+3*70-sqrt(81))))(3*17^4-(sqrt(256)+31*30^2))(17*8!+93^2-10)(12*(11^2-6)/(5*pi)integ(4sin(x)/x,x,0,inf))-3) - Wolfram|Alpha
The 200 character limit in the input box is annoying, and it seems that you can't get around it by creating a URL manually. Managed to get it from 220 characters to under 200 by using valid shortened stuff like "integ" instead of "integral", and removing * and () where possible.
There is no google gears anymore. It's all in HTML5 now.
Write boring code, not shiny code!