Engine Yard contest

Ok, many of you may not have heard about it but this july, EngineYard made a contest consisting on finding Hamming distances between one 12 word string and one you could make choosing 12 words randomly from a 1000 word dictionary and including a 13th word made of 5 random characters, the team or individual with the lowest distance wins.

So a good friend of mine, ecin, sends me a message about the contest, he says he wants in. Obviously I ask "how? we don't have all that computing power", he responds: "let's steal our school's PCs and who knows maybe we win", I said game on. Prior to the day of the contest we contacted our good friend projectnoa (taking his twitter name because I don't wanna mention real names), told him about the contest and he decided to join us.

We had over 120+ PCs for something like 15 hours running the code and sending the combination that got us the lower HD to our server (ecin's MacBook), the above pic is of one of the labs we hijacked for our operation.

At the end we didn't win the contest (we got 38 HD and the winners got a distance of 30), but it was a nice experience all along. And we wanna thank INTEC's lab manager ecabrera for supporting us in this adventure.

Another contest by EngineYard taking place on september, we'll be there, hope some of you decide to join too.