From the article: [S]py masters have used riddles and puzzles as a recruitment technique going back at least to World War II, when British cryptographer Alan Turing used an extremely challenging crossword to help find agents who could crack Nazi codes. Recently, corporations have also found ciphers useful for scouting. In 2004, a billboard appeared in Silicon Valley with just the cryptic phrase {first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}. The answer, 7,427,466,391 – with the added – led to a Web page with another mind-numbing math problem, which ultimately landed on the homepage of Google Labs, the testing wing of the online behemoth. ... Perhaps 3301 was Google, the solvers speculated, or some other corporation, or government, or hacker group – they had no idea. The meta-mystery of 3301s identity made this riddle all the more compelling. Usually with puzzles in a book or on a website, you know the driving force behind it, says Kenny Paterson, a cryptographer and professor of Information Security at the University of London. But here no one knows what the goal is, what you get, how you know when you won.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 21:50:43 +0000
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