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davorg (18)

davorg
  dave@dave.org.uk
http://dave.org.uk/
Yahoo! ID: daveorguk (Add User, Send Message)

Hacker, author, trainer

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Journal of davorg (18)

Tuesday July 13, 2004
09:00 AM

Google Job Ad Puzzle

[ #19819 ]

See here.

Google have registered a domain, $foo.com, where $foo is the first ten digit prime number made from consecutive digits of e. The next puzzle is at that URL.

Of course all that prime number computation is terribly tedious, so on #london.pm we came up with a solution that didn't involve calculating any prime numbers.

Can anyone work out what we did?


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  • I solved that in twenty seconds.

    I googled for it.

  • The digits of e go on forever and don't repeat, so I guessed that any consecutive sequence of 10 digits is found in e. Then just google for a list of prime numbers and find the first one in this list [prime-numbers.org]. However, I didn't find that URL. Now I realize that what they really meant was to find the first 10-digit sequence in e (like by dragging a 10-digit window from left to right along the number) which happens to be a prime number, not the first prime number that happens to be in e.

    Next I'd try to find an alphab

  • You went to a list of digits [nasa.gov] and then did a URL lookup on each one until you found the one that Google registered?

    Of course you can just use [cpan://Math::Pari] to do the calculation for you. I did it using factorint and looking for a ; in the complete factorization. Who cares how much computer effort that wastes when it takes under a tenth of a second to run?

  • And solved the second puzzle as well. Unfortunately, that's the end of the road for the puzzles. Shame, as it was a great way to pass the time!
    • Perhaps Google plan to waste hours of their competitors' employees time with silly quizzes. I'm currently out of work, so I waste my time with far more trivial things.
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