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1212448500 – Fourth and Last Google Treasure Hunt Task

1212448500 =>компютри Monday, June 2nd 2008, 16:15:00 (GMT -7)

If I am right (please correct me if I am wrong!), that would be Tuesday, June 3rd 2008, 1:15:00 (GMT +2) in my time zone or Tuesday, June 3rd 2008, 4:45:00 (GMT +5.5) in India.

I bet we won’t have much sleep that night :-)

(via GoogleBlog)

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22 Responses

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  1. Mário Freitas says

    As posted in my blog, I believe that if 1212448500 represents the “time in seconds since the Epoch (00:00:00 UTC, January 1, 1970)”, it points to 00:15:00 in UTC+0/GMT+0 which is 1 hour less than your prediction.
    How did you calculate that date and time?

    Best regards

  2. CoCaman says

    Thanks Mário.

    I used this online converter. Faster than start my webserver and write two lines of code ;-)

    Isn’t CEST (Center European Summer Time) UTC+2 hours? @see http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/cest.html.
    Well, I will be up at midnight and at 1am :-)

    Thanks again

  3. Mário Freitas says

    It appears I forgot the Summer Time adjustment for Western Europe which started March 30, 2008 and will end October 26, 2008.In that case it means that when I calculated the date/time as 00:15:00 it was in GMT+1.

    You are correct CoCaman!

  4. CoCaman says

    Hi Mário

    I guess I will see you tonight at 01:15am CEST (GMT +2)?

    Good luck with the puzzle :-)

  5. cr4y says

    I’ll be there too =)

  6. cr4y says

    done! was quite funny ^^

  7. CoCaman says

    nice one cr4y

    I went to bet at 2:30am. My Eclipse always dies with so many prime numbers… but I keep trying!

    How did you solve it? Scripting or programming?

  8. cr4y says

    I used a pre generated list of the first 100.000 primes (think this should always be enough) and a little c# programm for summing up. get’s the result in under 40sec =)

  9. Mário Freitas says

    Hi everyone!
    Congratulations cr4y!

    I tried half yesterday half today solving this… I’m not sure if I beat it but I have the feeling I haven’t solved it and I have to “come back in 11 hours to see how” I did.

    I spent many hours thinking I had too few PI numbers and that the program was taking too much time to calculate them… Then I thought I had made mistakes with the reasoning behind the sums…

    This one is tricky!

  10. cr4y says

    hrhr thx =) if you post your sum counts i can validate your result against my code!

  11. Mário Freitas says

    Thanks cr4y. Could you send me your counts too?

    [11, 83, 183, 631, 1037] to avoid any possible *spoilers* my solution has 7 digits, starts with number 7 and ends in 3.

    Do you confirm this?

  12. Christoph N. says

    Hi Mário,

    i just finished my solution and tried it out with your values. Now i am happy that i seem to have the same result :D .

    My solution computes its primes itself and takes about 0,56 sec at all :) . Too bad, i could not do it yesterday night :(

    Greetings

  13. cr4y says

    75*4**3 =) Confirm!

    Your question: [7, 83, 245, 845]
    Your answer: **717*3

    Your answer was: Correct =)

  14. Mário Freitas says

    Yes cr4y,
    5*****3

    I’ve just received the confirmation from Google : “Your answer was: Correct” after 11 long hours waiting for the result =)

    By the way, I’ll be blogging in the next couple hours with source code included of my solution in C++. It does pre-calculation of PI values in runtime and has solved both problems ([7, 83, 245, 845] and [11, 83, 183, 631, 1037]) in 4 seconds.

    Thanks for your input guys!

  15. uzi says

    Maybe I’ll join the fray… first off, on the time thing… launch python and type:

    >>> import time
    >>> time.ctime(1212448500)
    ‘Mon Jun 2 16:15:00 2008′

    For the prime number solution, I also did it in python… didn’t get started until 8 hours after the fact, but I did it quickly. Output of mine for Mario’s set of [11, 83, 183, 631, 1037] shows:

    Generating list of primes…
    Done.
    Took 3.477478 second(s) to generate.
    Computing…
    Took 0.312693 second(s) to compute.
    Our Prime = [Omitted]

    The [7, 83, 245, 845] set took 0.222756 second(s) to compute… python lends itself really nicely to this problem. I was given the set of [3, 37, 397, 589], which took about 0.4s to compute (all on my MacBook Pro).

    So yeah, I generate an array of primes and then compute based on that array. Generating the array takes most of the time. :)

  16. Mário Freitas says

    I also confirm what uzi is saying about the time it takes to compute the primes.

    $ ./sumprimes
    Precalculating…
    348513 primes pre-calculated
    Took 3.01764 seconds <- the time it took to calculate primes up to the integer 8000000
    Result: ******* [ommited]
    Took 0.0612206 seconds <- the time it took to calculate after primes were generated

  17. Christoph N. says

    Which algorihm do you use? I get achieve this performance with the {11, 83, 183, 631, 1037} example, using Java on a Core Duo 1,8 Ghz:

    Precalculating primes up to 8000000
    finished in 0,433937 sec
    found 539777 primes

    Calculating lists
    finished in 0,038925 sec

    result: *******
    total time: 0,502695 sec

  18. Mário Freitas says

    Great results Christopher! When I saw your results now I felt kind of surprised because they are way much faster than mine. Now I noticed a bottleneck in my program was that I was using the bigint library from the beginning (to avoid integer overflows and all). I changed it to 64 bits and it turned out to:
    $ ./sumprimes
    Precalculating…
    348513 primes pre-calculated
    Took 0.221172 seconds
    Result: 7514623
    Took 0.00250829 seconds

    I’m using the Sieve of Erastothenes to generate the primes as you check from my blog (solution in C++).

  19. Mário Freitas says

    Ooops… I forgot to remove the result from my previous post.

  20. Edgar Acosta says

    Has anyone heard about the results of the treasure hunt? I guess they have forgotten about it.

  21. Mário Freitas says

    Hi there,
    Not really. I remember that a few weeks after the puzzles where published, I was googling and checking GoogleBlog but I found nothing about the results of GTH. I guess Google contacted the winners directly but it would be nice if they had at least published the results not to speak about (at least) their official comments on the possible solutions for the 4 puzzles… Of course it shouldn’t be difficult to find thousands of solutions from folks like you and me published all over the Internet, but I would like to see how they would expect the problems to be solved and also to speak about the less obvious solutions that people proposed.
    If anyone finds where (if) Google has published the results, please let me know.