FOREWORD: This Challenge was devised by Christophe and submitted as a geek level to the Open Source Institute in September 2007. Despite the website's claim that "You can easily send us a challenge idea which we can get running in no time at all", and after over a month of discussions and many efforts to make the text clearer, the challenge hadn't been released, so the author decided to make it public. This is the latest version of the challenge, as it was submitted in October 2007. Have fun!


OSIX Challenge
Play Geek
Pixel by Pixel
Manipulating an image file, four pixels at a time.


Pixel by Pixel

The password you want is hidden in the image above. The password is case-sensitive and contains numbers. To make it appear, you will need to take all pixels in the image, 4 by 4, splitting each 2x2 block into the 4 corners, in parallel, as illustrated on the image above for 2 such blocks in a 12x8 image. No pixel will be lost in the transformation and the new image will be a juxtaposition of four reduced versions of the original image.

If everything goes fine, you should see the password appear... after 500,000,000 repeats of the complete transformation!


Hint: Before you reach 10 repeats however, you should see something "happening" with the image. This has nothing to do with the password, but might make your journey shorter than expected!



Copyright 2007 Christophe Deprez
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