Programming Challenge 10 - Hide Text in Plain View

This programming Challenge ran until the end of March 2008 and is about taking the sentence "My birthday falls on March 15th" and somehow concealing it within a body of text (from a book) using any method you can think of so it isn't obvious that it is stored there and then subsequently being able to retrieve it. I.e. if you were to send someone the file, it would just look like the book and you'd not notice that it contained a secret message. Clearly this means not messing up the text of the book too obviously!

The body of text is a popular book- The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and one of the most popular full length Sherlock Holmes stories. The original text came from the Project Gutenberg website.

• Download Zip File with book text.

You have complete freedom in how you store and retrieve the secret text. The only criterion being that the original sentence should not be easily discernible and the original book should be readable.

Results

There were seven entries (2 from the same bloke) and some pretty clever, not to mention fast code. One had no timing code (Mr. Runyan) but congratulations for his fastest time to Sameerkumar Namdeo. Note that times shown are the total of both encrypt and decode.

1. Sameerkumar Namdeo (India) Time = 0.0068953
2. Robert C Cartaino (USA) Time = 0.0097779
3. Amitav Guha Thakurta (Bangladesh) Time = 0.011177
4. Robert C Cartaino (2) (USA) Time = 0.021349
5. Sean Baker (USA) Time = 0.074903
6. St0le (India) Time = 0.1381943
7. Chris Runyan (USA) Untimed

More Programming Challenges

• Link to Rock, Scissors and Paper Bot Ongoing Programming Challenge - Runs weekly.
• Link to Programming Challenge 2 - Count the Islands. (Finished)
• Link to Programming Challenge 3 - Manage Elevators. (Finished)
• Link to Programming Challenge 4 - Guess the Mastermind Code - (Finished)
• Link to Programming Challenge 5 - Squeeze words into a crossword grid - (Finished)
• Link to Programming Challenge 6 - Guess the Mastermind Code - (Finished)
• Link to Programming Challenge 7 - Validate Chess Positions - (Finished)
• Link to Programming Challenge 8 - Score Poker Hands - (Finished)
• Link to Programming Challenge 9 - Manage a Data structure - (Finished)
• Link to Programming Challenge 11 - Find matching sets of cards (Deadline April 30 2008)