As this started late, it has an extended deadline.
One way to send secret information is to display it in another form, or hide it in something. So this contest gives you a short block of text and a text file containing approximately 5,000 quotes, each on one line. How you hide the text is up to you: you might encode each character of the text as a quote, or use part of the quotes. There are only two criteria that matter: is that you must be able to generate a file that can be decoded and it must look fairly innocuous; ie if it was sent in an email, it might be mistaken for spam but wouldn't appear as an encoded message .
Input Files
- Text to disguise
- Phrases file (zipped)
Output Files
Please output an encoded.txt file and then a results.txt file which should be generated from the encoded.txt file and has identical content to the original text.
Winning the Contest
I'm going to be subjective, speed will count but also how well the encoded file reads, size of the encoded.txt file (smaller is better). However this is not an out and out speed contest.
Timing Code
Please time from the start of the run until just before the output file is opened for writing. This code below will do high speed timing for Windows (first three) and the fourth one for Linux.
Final Results
Congratulations to Clark Jennings who won not only because he was the only entrant but because his was an imaginative and well coded entry.
- Clark Jennings C# (Variable Time)
Rules
This is for glory only. About.com does not permit prizes to be given.Please submit your source code and the output file to the cplus.guide@about.com?subject=Programming Contest 47 email address with the subject line Programming Contest 47.
It must compile with Open Watcom, Microsoft Visual C++ 2008/2010 Express Edition/Microsoft Visual Studio 2008/2010 or Borland Turbo C++ Explorer, Microsoft Visual C# 2008/2010 Express Edition or GCC/G++. If it doesn't compile, it can't be run so is automatically disqualified.
Please include your name, age (optional), blog/website url (optional) and country. Your email address will not be kept, used or displayed except to acknowledge your challenge entry. You can submit as many entries as you like before the deadline which is June 30 2011.
The top ten entries will be listed, judged purely on points. A condition of entry is that you allow your source code to be published on this website, with full credits to you as the author.
- An index of Every Past Programming Contest on this site
