www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/21/google-is-searching-for-beautiful-minds-but-so-far-no-m-i-t-students-have-broken-its-code -> www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/21/google-is-searching-for-beautiful-minds-but-so-far-no-m-i-t-students-have-broken-its-code/
Part of the movie A Beautiful Mind takes place there and in real life it's always had close ties with the military and intelligence agencies. Tech companies also like to recruit there, and Google is no exception. In search of some beautiful minds, Google has been putting up signs around the MIT campus with a code that say, "If you can figure this out, you may have a future with Google." If they crack the code, which is a fairly simple substitution cipher (or not), it reveals a phone number where they can leave their contact information. students have been able to crack the code, or at least they haven't bothered to leave a voicemail. The first person to crack the code gets a TechCrunch T-shirt, or maybe a job at Google if you call the number and leave your name.
September 21st, 2009 at 10:33 am CDT "I am not really interesting in working for Google because I can do math but I can't speaking" And yeah, would love the solution, I'll take the job...
IMDB: After the conclusion of Nashs studies as a student at Princeton, he accepts a prestigious appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with his friends Sol and Bender. Five years later while teaching a class on Calculus at MIT, he places a particularly interesting problem on the chalkboard that he dares his students to solve. When his student Alicia Larde comes to his office to discuss the problem, the two fall in love and eventually marry.
September 21st, 2009 at 9:06 am CDT Maybe this is a sign that the economy is getting better since the students aren't that desperate to waste time on this silly riddle just to get their resume ahead on the list. Enough people from around here get jobs (at Google too) without the need for riddles like this, and they rather be spending their time doing important globally relevant things like put a police car on top of the MIT dome, drop a piano from a dorm roof, or just watch Rocky Horror for the 1000th time..
No thanks, we are at MIT and we don't really have a dearth for nicer, smarter less arrogant people who want to hire us, when we are not founding our own companies. Lot more fun working on the dome hacks instead of this silly riddle!
September 21st, 2009 at 2:52 pm CDT I think that's a piss poor reason not to take a shot at it. Just because you're at MIT doesn't (or at least shouldn't) mean you get a job anywhere you want. I believe that, yes, you probably could get a job at Google if you wanted to without solving the code, but they're trying to introduce some sport into the matter and make things fun. They're not trying to have you solve some meaningless riddle with the hopes that you may one day "work at google." Maybe theyr'e hoping one day you'll stop just thinking you're smarter than everyone else and actually prove it.
September 21st, 2009 at 2:54 pm CDT Oh dear, I seem to have misspelled some things within my rant. s/theyr'e/they're/ and any other mistakes I may have made (I want to catch them before someone goes OH DEAR YOU CAN'T FORM A GOOD ARGUMENT BECAUSE YOU CAN'T SPELL).
September 21st, 2009 at 2:55 pm CDT That's the answer that I came up with as well, within the first few minutes, but I don't know of its actual authenticity.
September 21st, 2009 at 9:42 am CDT You know, I had this thought also, but I wasn't 100% positive so I did a quick check over at Wikipedia to prevent myself from from incorrectly spouting off and looking like an ass.
September 21st, 2009 at 9:10 am CDT From a HR Standpoint, I would think that such a qualifier would certainly weed out some less then motivated persons.
September 21st, 2009 at 9:13 am CDT easy, the code is 77556722063, you huys can have the job at google thanks, i'm from a third world country, they'll never give it to me.
September 21st, 2009 at 9:23 am CDT what the hell is wrong with all these pseudo-geeks? you think you're all better, you use google, windows, mac, etc, and you criticize them, can you do anything better? two great people Sergey Brim and Larry page, people who i'm 100% sure all of you who criticize and say how easy, why do i need it, uhhhh! i bet my 3rd world country salary, you guys would've treated them like shit. Because it's the people who criticize the most, the ones who do nothing about anything. May the one who has a top ranked company based on searching the internet cast the first stone.
September 21st, 2009 at 11:37 am CDT Who the heck has a fax machine, anymore? The least they could do is set it up with GoogleVoice and have instructions on where to email the resume.
September 21st, 2009 at 10:36 am CDT I am getting the same busy message from: 617 274 8659 (the number I figured from the picture) and 866 688 6235 (which logically you would think this is the number is sequence "866 688 6232'', but by being a fax number, common knowledge says that going up or down on the last digit is an actual phone line. So replacing the last number with either a "5'' "1'' or "3'' was figured and I get the same busy message with both numbers above.
September 21st, 2009 at 10:01 am CDT 617 274 8658 is also a fax number... Just count the amount of characters with empty spaces a a break then count how many empty spaces collectivly for the last number = a fax line.
September 21st, 2009 at 11:33 am CDT How are you getting this number? I'm guessing that maybe you're doing this by adding up the number of characters before each space (not including linebreaks?
September 21st, 2009 at 12:35 pm CDT Thanks Aleksey, Do I get a shirt or can I pitch a product instead? Well in the end I hope this is really the number (it is in that riddle) and it feels great to get "something" out of it.
September 21st, 2009 at 1:50 pm CDT And now "he can figure out the riddle but his grammar is awful", lol, sorry, I am posting these things while doing a million other things.
September 21st, 2009 at 10:14 am CDT awesome, I called the decrypted number, told em I want the job and they said ok with no questions asked! just wonder why the said I'll have to pay for my own uniform...
September 21st, 2009 at 10:28 am CDT aa and ii both occur. Neither can be the word Google, with the two oo = aa or ii. Thus, one of the is probably part of the phone number 800-xxx-xxxx with 00 = aa or ii. I tried transpositions of the alphabet+number series to match this up and could not see anything. Also note the blank space has the highest frequency, which usually gets assigned E, but again this turns out nothing.
We're most likely looking for either a 10 or 11 digit number. Since that gives us 47 non-space characters, we can infer that we're looking for an 11 digit number where each digit is represented by 5 characters and the spaces are also encrypted.
September 21st, 2009 at 10:31 am CDT I just looked at only the numbers ("figure this out"), and got 866 6886 23 25 13. Then I guessed that 13 might be either the 2nd number, like 2313, or 13 might be some code to enter after the number ending in 2325.
September 21st, 2009 at 10:40 am CDT If you look at the code there are 11 characters across including spaces and 5 lines. A phone number normally has 10 digits minus the 1, so that would mean there are 2 numbers per line.
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