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The Sonicare Intelliclean Ultrasonic Toothbrush

on June 24, 2005

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UPDATE

This post has been updated and was moved to my new blog.

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The Da Vinci Code Quest: Final Challenge - Solved in 5 minutes

I've just solved in ~5 minutes the Final Challenge on Google's Da Vinci Code Quest. You can view a video of my solution below, at Google Video or on YouTube . The movie is not accelerated and was shot using Camtasia Studio . Did I cheat? Where is the limit between cheating and not cheating? Some have apparently reverse engineered the Flash code behind the puzzles to basically tell the Sony servers that the puzzle was completed (" this.onPuzzleCompleted(); "). Others actually took the time to solve the chess challenge instead of brute-forcing it . If you want to win, you have to cheat somehow. Assuming that reverse engineering the code would disqualify you, the only method left is to employ some sort of automation tool (unless you have a savant acquaintance) to solve the puzzles. This in turn requires an extra finalist account to test your tool, unless you want to risk sending multiple solutions from your real account. I'd like to thank Aaron Froehlich for prom

How The Da Vinci Code Doesn't Work - from Howstuffworks.com

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Solving the DaVinci Code puzzles without having read the book

As you probably know, on April 17, Google launched an online contest for solving a series of 24 puzzles revolving around the book "The DaVinci Code" by Dan Brown. My quest is to see how many puzzles I can solve without having read the book. I will only use the Internet to search for information and I do not have an electronic copy of the book. So far, I have solved the first 3 puzzles, which I found of decreasingly (intrinsic) difficulty. Why don't I plan to read this best-seller? Some time ago on a long road trip, I listened to some parts of it in an audiobook version. In the chapters of the book that I listened to, Dan Brown mentioned the striking properties of the Golden Ratio . After reading Nature's Numbers by mathematician Ian Stewart , you'll learn not to marvel at some hidden divine meaning behind everything, but rather spend your time trying to understand why things are the way they are. It looks to me that Dan Brown is hung up on mysteries, secrets,

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