Win $250 - the Black Box challenge

[neviksti]

EDIT: -- Contest closed --
The majority of this has been solved by Andreas Naive.

The challenge setup:
You have access to a "black box" in which you can give it a 32bit number and it will spit out another 32bit number. You may assume that the blackbox is deterministic with no time dependance, ie. you put in the same input and you will always get the same output.

The challenge is:
Can you determine the "inner workings" of the "black box" by careful choice of what input to give it as a challenge and looking at its response?

(There's even a classic old board game (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/165) based on this principle. I enjoyed that as a kid.)

The rules:
- I'll give you some starting input challenges -> responses of the black box to get everyone started.
- To allow people to learn more about the black box using challenges of their own devising, if you post a request clearly explaining what inputs to give to the blackbox, I will run up to 16k challenges a day (in the order that requests are received) and publicly post the output.
- First to figure out the algorithm and explain their method to do so will win $250 to be paid by paypal.

That's it! Go for it.

[Git]

Add a couple of zeros and it may be worth thinking about ;)

Git

[neviksti]

Aww, it's just supposed to be a fun challenge, with the money as a bonus prize on top of that. Maybe I shouldn't have put that in there... now people might only focus on the money.

Have some fun, win a contest, and take a bunch of your friends out to dinner to celebrate... on me. (Or buy a bunch of video games, or whatever you feel like splurging $250 on.)

Reverse engineering as a hobby is a lot like Sudoku, or a crossword puzzle: most people do it primarily because they enjoy the challenge. If this challenge doesn't sound interesting to anyone, I'll remove it and try to find a better one. But hopefully some curious people will at least give it a try first.

[cEnginEEr]

well, finding the relation between input-output just by analyzing some dumped data is less likely to be possible; it could be any thing like a complicated hash function or a very non-linear algorithm; so how one can recover this kind of algo just by using some q/a table; I think you should go back to the hardware itself; also have a talk with 'Sab' on woodmann forum...

Regards

[Git]

> Aww, it's just supposed to be a fun challenge

No, if it was a fun challenge you wouldn't be offering money and I'd happily be having a go just for the fun of it. The fact that you're offering money means it's worth something to you and you hope to make more money from it which in turn means, in my opinion, it has no place here.

Git

[Terminator3]

> Aww, it's just supposed to be a fun challenge

No, if it was a fun challenge you wouldn't be offering money and I'd happily be having a go just for the fun of it. The fact that you're offering money means it's worth something to you and you hope to make more money from it which in turn means, in my opinion, it has no place here.

Git

Money is money, if you can do it, why not?

[neviksti]

> Aww, it's just supposed to be a fun challenge

No, if it was a fun challenge you wouldn't be offering money and I'd happily be having a go just for the fun of it. The fact that you're offering money means it's worth something to you and you hope to make more money from it which in turn means, in my opinion, it has no place here.

Git
Wow, you are cynical. If you aren't interested in working on the puzzle fine, but please don't blame this on cynical imaginations of my motivation. You almost seem upset that I would offer money, and if it was that inappropriate I appologize, as I did not know.

You are right that I'm offering money because it is worth something to me, but this knowledge can not make me any money. I want to know how it works purely because simply I really want to know how it works.

Git:
> if it was [just] a fun challenge ... I'd happily be having a go just for the fun of it.

So I hope you will reconsider. I understand if you do not.

[sparpacillon]

i think that what GIT said is not cynic but REALISTIC.
but this knowledge can not make me any money

i read somewhere that knowledge is power.. :D (in every form)