| March 13, 2006 Vol. 77, no.
9S
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| BE
A PLAYER:
Michael Cho with a flyer about his contest. “I really want
to give away $100, so just play!” he says. (Rachel Shafer photo)
|
Wanted: Gamers with lots of friends and patience
EECS student launches online, multi-player code-breaking contest
Everyone likes a secret revealed. EECS graduate student Michael Cho
recently created an online game of it. Milliondollarscode.com is a
code-breaking contest where players compete to decipher a famous quote
first and win $100. The quote is hidden somewhere under 16,000 characters
and embedded among random letters and numbers.
“You don’t need to be a cryptography expert to solve the
puzzle,” Cho
explains. “I designed it so a smart 14-year-old could win.”
In fact, the trick with this game is not so much the brilliant smarts
of one person but the power derived from ever greater numbers of people
playing. Each person who registers gets to reveal one additional letter,
which appears by midnight the same day. Instant gratification this
is not.
The game takes patience, says Cho, who is working on the project with
his friend Beng Yip. “We’re updating the revealed characters
manually (in case of any hacking attempts), so we might be overwhelmed
on days when we receive a big influx of requests,” he explains.
Furthermore, because each player can reveal only one character, the
game hinges on many people playing and then sticking around long enough
to figure out the quote.
To create the site, Cho taught himself web programming. He admits
he’s
gotten some negative feedback that it’s complicated and confusing
and may be untrustworthy. He says he takes the comments to heart and
is making adjustments.
The site got its start when Cho was inspired by the popular website
Milliondollarhomepage.com, where a British man sold advertisers one
pixel of his website space for one dollar, a site now worth one million
dollars. Cho says he hopes to apply the same concept to his site by
eventually charging players $5 to play the game in exchange for a chance
to win the million-dollar pot.
But he’s also realistic. “There’s a really small
chance this will work, but if I don’t try, I’ll never know.”
You decide. Go to www.milliondollarscode.com/.
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