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ItalianoJamendo geeks solve the hidden Chrome OS equation (and win a Cr-48 netbook)
(Reposted from our CTO Sylvain Zimmer‘s blog, which crashed under heavy traffic)
How crazy is this !! ;-)
By now if you’re as RSS-addicted as me you’ve probably seen the excellent “How to remain calm” Chrome OS video. Like the previous potato-powered Chrome ad, excellent job from the marketing guys at Google!
However this time with my fellow geeks at Jamendo we noticed an equation hidden at 2:23 in the video. We then proceeded to lose several hours of productivity running it through Wolfram Alpha…
All we got was X = 900.91/191605050401140404051920181525 ~= 4.7*10^-27 and we were not even sure of this one number because of barely readable numbers in the original video. At this point we were quite sure that there was something to find (and hopefully to win) but still had to find a way to give a meaning to this number.
The first path we explored was in Physics, 1.66*10^-27 being the atomic mass constant u. Having X=2.83u didn’t make much sense: too far from 2.0x or 3.0x where the closest elements I knew are. Then my friend Joachim Rambeau tipped me off with an idea on “Chrome UX” being the name of the team that released the video. There was an X in there! With the equation X=(U/Chrome), U being the mass of Uranium (~238u depending on isotopes) and “Chrome” the mass of Cr-48 or related isotopes, we found ourselves very close to the 4.7 ballpark. I posted this as a comment in the video, without much hope of it being the definite answer.
So we left this for a few hours and got back to work. Funny coincidence? The current work at Jamendo is actually building a Jamendo Pro player on cheap Android tablets ;-) So we didn’t quite leave the Google world…
Anyway, while having drinks at the office at the end of the day (Yes, Jamendo is almost as cool to work at as Google) , we realized “900.91″ did actually reference the goo.gl url shortener. The division obviously meant a slash in an URL, and then we had to make sense of the 191605050401140404051920181525 to find an URL. But the excitation was growing, we knew we were on the right path this time!
Unfortunately, at this point I had to leave and go catch a TGV back to Paris. I’m actually still on the TGV as I’m writing this, thanks to Android tethering ;-) Anyway, I tried to convert the 30 numbers into 4 characters, like all goo.gl URLs. Didn’t have much luck, I was trying to prepend “00″ at the beginning to have 32 characters, but couldn’t make sense of the resulting sequence “00191605 05040114 04040519 20181525″.
That was when I noticed there were far too many zeroes in that sequence, even without the ones I added… So I tried different splits, and ended up with “19 16 05 05 04 01 14 04 04 05 19 20 18 15 25″.
There, any geek would have known what to do! I translated it to letters and got “s p e e d a n d d e s t r o y”. Obviously, at this point my fingers were very shaky! But I managed to type goo.gl/speedanddestroy in my browser and got to a form telling me that I was the “first to figure out our MENSA-certified puzzle” and would receive a Cr-48. WIN ! ;-)
Here is a screenshot of that page:
I think I was indeed the first because now the goo.gl link just says “The form you are trying to access has either expired or reached its maximum registration limit.”. Well, that’s pretty cool if you ask me ;-) (Funny details, while submitting the form, I crossed the Luxembourg/France border, the tethering went off and I started sweating they were going to check the IP address but I was still able to submit the form from France)
Big credits must go to the to the tech team at Jamendo: our genius lead developer Vincent who showed us the video first, our incredible Android hacker Mauro who helped me a lot with the actual equation, my fellow Jamendo Co-Founder Laurent and my own personal Physics expert Joachim Rambeau.
Anyway, congrats to Google for being such nerds. The video itself is really funny, embedding an easter egg is even cooler, and, well, most people I know including myself couldn’t go back to anything else than Chromium/V8 anymore.
I’m obviously quite happy to have won the Cr-48 notebook, I also hope Google may start giving a little more attention to Jamendo! If you pardon the plug, we’re the biggest Creative Commons music repository, and we’ve never succeeded inking a deal with YouTube about these hundred of thousands of CC music tracks (be it AudioSwap integration, proper CC attribution, revenue sharing, …). Let’s hope that will happen in the future!
PS: Hey Google, could we also have one of the destroyed notebooks to include in our gallery ? ;-)
PS2: The form says that I should live in the U.S. to receive the notebook but sorry that’s not the case obviously! I left the address of a U.S. relative but I can’t imagine it being a real issue just for one laptop. I’ll keep everybody updated as I get contacted by Google.
–
Jamendo’s Founder & CTO Sylvain Zimmer, December 10th 2010
December 10th, 2010 at 11:18 pm
Simply awesome! you’ve made my day with this story.
December 10th, 2010 at 11:31 pm
[...] Sauf qu’en fait, au milieu de la vidéo on voit sur un tableau une équation à la con, et du coup des personnes de chez Jamendo se sont amusées à la résoudre… Je vais vous laisser lire la suite sur leur blog, mais pour faire simple, on obtient une [...]
December 10th, 2010 at 11:55 pm
Good work Sylvain ! Your team really deserve this notebook ! :)
And about Jamendo integration with YouTube, I couldn’t agree more ! :)
December 10th, 2010 at 11:58 pm
This is so awesome, well done, both you and google. Remember: there’s always a bigger nerd.
December 11th, 2010 at 12:06 am
This is just fantastic! Congrats on this one – finding and solving it! :)
December 11th, 2010 at 12:10 am
Wow, wonderful job and very good luck to get a cr48!
congrats.
December 11th, 2010 at 12:32 am
[...] Visto en el blog de Sylvain Zimmer. [...]
December 11th, 2010 at 1:02 am
Bonus, the source of the equation we used into Wolfram Alpha :)
((9*10^4+3^4+10)/100) / (
(
(2^8) – 10 + (4*(6!))+17^4+(11!/5)+(integrate 3x^5 dx from x=1 to x=9 )
)*(
2*23^6-((2^28+4)/10-(22^4+3*70-sqrt(81))
)*(
3×17^4-(sqrt(256)+31×30^2)
)*(
17*8!+93^2-10
)*(
(12*(11^2-6)/(5*Pi))*(integrate (4*sin x)/x dx from x=0 to infinity)
)
-3
)
December 11th, 2010 at 1:08 am
Nice one.
December 11th, 2010 at 2:42 am
A blog entry about advanced physics, yet fails in common grammar. *LOSE NOT LOOSE.
December 11th, 2010 at 2:49 am
Congrats!
Just wondering, do you also have an address in the US to ship the notebook to (since you were on the train in France)? Or did you have it shipped to someone else?
December 11th, 2010 at 2:56 am
Thanks Mr-Mark, fixed it. Sorry I’m not english native, and that brings me to the question of Frederick, yes I asked to ship it to a relative in the U.S. We’ll see what happens… Would be bad publicity after so much genius from them to refuse sending it… I don’t think it will happen :)
December 11th, 2010 at 2:58 am
I must have skipped over your second post scriptum. Never mind my question then. :)
December 11th, 2010 at 3:50 am
Congrats.
I saw this on http://chrome.blogspot.com/
December 11th, 2010 at 8:22 am
[...] При переходе по ссылке счастливчик получает возможность заказать себе ноутбук с Chrome OS. Но на данный момент эта «пасхалка» уже обнародована и победили парни из команды Jamendo. [...]
December 11th, 2010 at 8:24 am
[...] 点击这里看成功破解该彩蛋的人是如何一步一步想的，最重要的是学习他的思维，因为他也遇到了多次失败才成功破解出来。哥们，你真NB。 [...]
December 11th, 2010 at 8:48 am
[...] by socialcouch to programming [link] [41 comments] reddit: the voice of the internet — news before it happens @ [...]
December 11th, 2010 at 9:08 am
Powerful
December 11th, 2010 at 10:14 am
It’s US only because the laptops are Verizon-only for their mobile networking support, IIRC.
December 11th, 2010 at 11:00 am
nice, and it only took you a physicist and a mathematician to solve it.
December 11th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
Jamendo is a genius..
December 11th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Thanks for mentioning they were geeks. I wouldn’t have been able to deduce that from the title, or even the rest of the article.
December 11th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
He had a cousin in Houston that agreed to have it shipped to his house. There’s more discussion over on HN.
December 11th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
The U.S. restriction almost certainly has nothing to do with shipping costs, and everything to do with RF device licensing. I was involved in a device roll-out where the company sent promo devices out before receiving RF approval in the destination country. The whole thing turned into a mess of fines and a 6 month delay in launching for one particular country.
The moral of the story is don’t fuck with the FCC (or whatever the equivalent is in your particular country).
December 11th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
I’d be pretty upset if I went through all that only to find it was US only.
December 11th, 2010 at 1:51 pm
You clearly deserve it, congratulations!
A great story. Well done! :-)
December 11th, 2010 at 2:42 pm
The Chrome team has blogged about this story:
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/12/x-g-chrom-3.html
December 11th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
华语使用者来此观光,并向楼主和Google 市场人员表示敬意!
太犀利了!
a wonderful legend, good job!
;-)
December 11th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
congrats guys..u deserve it…:)
December 11th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
I think you need more winky faces.
December 11th, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Simply put – you rock.
December 11th, 2010 at 5:32 pm
removed some winky faces, now that the excitation is a bit lower it indeed felt a bit over the top :)
December 11th, 2010 at 7:04 pm
you sir..
a truly geek :)
December 11th, 2010 at 7:44 pm
Just curious: Why did they have the puzzle certified by MENSA?
December 11th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
It is just WOW…
December 11th, 2010 at 9:19 pm
pistor: I’m waiting for them to contact me but I’m not actually sure if the MENSA certification is a joke or is real… I’ll ask them!
December 12th, 2010 at 12:36 am
First of all it’s a great story.
I am sure that, a lot of people can solve these equations but realizing 900.91 as goo.gl url shortener is really too difficult!
In your post, you said that “we realized 900.91 did actually reference the goo.gl url shortener.”
You said “we”, not me.
Who is the actual, real genus? Share this secret boy or girl with us!
On the other hand, how many times did you enter this form? :D
December 12th, 2010 at 12:58 am
Congratulations bro! Really good job!
But I am so sorry Sylvain Zimmer, I have told to Google that you are not living in U.S. so that they will send Cr-48 to me not you. Don’t wait it. :D
(The form says that you should live in the United States and have a US mailing address! )
Thank’s for Christmas Gif! :)
December 12th, 2010 at 2:57 am
нихрена не понял… да и хуй с ними!
December 12th, 2010 at 4:09 am
Congratulations
December 12th, 2010 at 4:26 am
Congratulations bro!!
December 12th, 2010 at 4:33 am
人才呀。恭喜你!
December 12th, 2010 at 4:44 am
Wow, that’s incredible for both Google and Jamendo (I’ve actually used your service before). I watched the video too and don’t even remember seeing the chalkboard, and even if I had seen it I might not have figured out the entire puzzle. Congratulations!
December 12th, 2010 at 5:39 am
不知道楼上哥们有中文留言,楼主是否看的懂,哈哈!
December 12th, 2010 at 5:57 am
神马都是浮云啊，哥不在美利坚。
December 12th, 2010 at 6:18 am
I truly savored this posting, might I replicate a part to a fresh site that I’m establishing?
December 12th, 2010 at 6:30 am
饭否观光团围观楼主
December 12th, 2010 at 6:47 am
你们有一个好，全世界不管哪里有新闻，你们跑得比谁都快…
December 12th, 2010 at 6:49 am
Hey congratulations, this is awesome!
December 12th, 2010 at 7:19 am
尽然看到午夜客，那个买ru域名的，世界真小
December 12th, 2010 at 7:20 am
An impressive series of excellent insights. Congratulations!
我们老外网上写中文真得意了吧。对不对？
December 12th, 2010 at 7:29 am
nice job
December 12th, 2010 at 8:10 am
crazy!
December 12th, 2010 at 8:36 am
膜拜ing……
December 12th, 2010 at 8:50 am
太有才了。
。。。膜拜了。。还有什么门没打开？？能不能通知我？
December 12th, 2010 at 9:16 am
Oh My god!!!
I can’t believe it is true! genius!
December 12th, 2010 at 9:28 am
很厉害啦
December 12th, 2010 at 9:49 am
genius!崇拜！
December 12th, 2010 at 10:22 am
genius!genius!
December 12th, 2010 at 10:34 am
What?
Chinese?
December 12th, 2010 at 11:11 am
Amazing… Congratulations, you clearly deserve it
December 12th, 2010 at 11:17 am
Good job!!
December 12th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Nice job and a good story!
December 12th, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Great work. Congratulations! I hope they send it to you.
December 12th, 2010 at 3:37 pm
恭喜恭喜啊！
December 12th, 2010 at 4:10 pm
Was it announced anywhere by Google that there is a puzzle in the video? If no, then I think that 99.99% people who saw the video were thinking that it was some random combination of numbers on the blackboard :)
December 12th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Another poster says: “Remember: there’s always a bigger nerd.”
Yeah, totally. When I read some of the deductions those guys made, I was totally left with the conclusion, “In the context of a ‘my e-d*ck is bigger than yours’ contest, irrespective of the fact that I am a woman and therefore don’t even have a literal e-d*ck myself, I have been *SO* *pwned* by these guys.”
And for the record, colleagues at a major tech company have referred to me as the geekiest woman they’ve ever known.
December 12th, 2010 at 4:24 pm
With regards to something just being some random crap on the blackboard… dude… when watching tech videos, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS read those blackboards/whiteboards. No telling what tech scoop you might find because someone didn’t bother to erase their board before filming and whoever did the filming didn’t notice it either. It’s happened repeatedly.
December 12th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
best geek story fun filled adventure mistery story I’ve read this year. congrats for getting it solved
December 12th, 2010 at 6:23 pm
神马都是浮云啊，哥不在美利坚。
哥在中国
December 12th, 2010 at 8:08 pm
nicely done ;>
December 12th, 2010 at 8:21 pm
عمل رائع حقا
Well done nerd. ;)
December 12th, 2010 at 8:25 pm
Actually, I think we have a larger CC music repository:
http://autosong.ninjam.com/
30,000 hours and counting….
December 12th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
Nice job!
December 12th, 2010 at 11:33 pm
Bravo les gars….c’est vrai la vidéo est géniale
December 13th, 2010 at 2:20 am
nice! Now I gotta go thru ALL Google’s promo stuff and see if there’s more goodies hidden in there somewhere!
December 13th, 2010 at 2:50 am
Nice work guys!
That was quite convoluted… Kudos on your team’s dedication and ingenuity!
December 13th, 2010 at 5:05 am
哈哈哈，牛叉
December 13th, 2010 at 6:38 am
NB
December 13th, 2010 at 7:47 am
rt
December 13th, 2010 at 9:17 am
CB圍觀、飯否圍觀、豆瓣圍觀
December 13th, 2010 at 10:19 am
Wow… Great stuff.
December 13th, 2010 at 10:39 am
And how do you guys use all this awesome mental power in you day jobs? -sharing music tracks! Sheesh – what is the world coming to!
December 13th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
I just watched the movie ‘A beautiful mind ‘ yesterday
This seems real! sensing okay :D
December 13th, 2010 at 12:11 pm
great!
December 13th, 2010 at 12:53 pm
yeah it’s funny that you won’t get your laptop and even if you would (by breaking the law) you cannot use it. :-P so that’s what happens when genius meets government and business, have a nice day. :-]
December 13th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
Great work man .
Anyway how do we get toknow of competition like this
I would love to compete against you in the next such event
December 13th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
哥，你是俺心里的神，虽然我知道你可能看不懂我说的
December 13th, 2010 at 2:44 pm
Huge respect for finding and solving it. I can’t help thinking there must have been other Google videos where noone even noticed there was a puzzle. I guess I should be watching those Google vids more carefully in the future.
December 13th, 2010 at 3:37 pm
好吧……我也来路过一下好了
哈哈哈
December 13th, 2010 at 5:49 pm
In future, everybody will look in google-videos for a secret message…
December 13th, 2010 at 7:03 pm
Awesome guys! =)
Congrats!
December 14th, 2010 at 3:21 am
good job！干得。。。漂亮
December 14th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
哈哈，恭喜你啊！
December 14th, 2010 at 2:13 pm
You deserve it! :D
Geeks RULEZ!!11one
December 14th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
你家祖坟冒青烟了阿
December 14th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
Very good team, i’m wondering to work with you in some day :)
congratulations!
December 14th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
Eres un genio….
December 15th, 2010 at 2:42 am
“Instead, we’re launching a pilot program where we will give test notebooks to qualified users, developers, schools and businesses. We’re starting with the US and will expand to other countries once we get the necessary certifications.”
Indirectly, they are using you to test their hardware :)
December 15th, 2010 at 3:58 am
omfg… totally ridiculously incredible.
for figuring that out, they should’ve also thrown in a few 1,000 shs of GOOG.
you guys are insane. saying “good work” doesn’t do you justice.
if you ever write a book on how to think, i’ll be the first in line to buy it.
CONGRATS!!!
December 15th, 2010 at 6:59 am
Geekiest thing I have seen till now..But it was way too awesome!!
December 15th, 2010 at 7:10 am
I am only 13 years old and I hope to be as smart as you.
December 15th, 2010 at 11:49 am
Really awesome,Congratzzz…
December 15th, 2010 at 1:37 pm
Šauni komanda nudirbusi šaunų darbą :)
Aš irgi norėčiau vieno sugadinto notebook’o
December 15th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
Google should hire you guys :)
December 15th, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Congrats you smarty, you!
Actually, my main thanks is for turning me onto Jemendo. I have been listening nonstop since I first read your post yesterday. AND I do have professional needs that require licensed music! So double score for me. To me, you winning this laptop has given me a reward at least equally as great: music to listen to, and an affordable source for licensed music.Congrats and thanks!
December 15th, 2010 at 11:32 pm
Bravo à toi Sylvain et à ceux qui t’ont aidé.
Je vous croyez brillants à Jamendo mais là vous êtes éblouissants.
Une fois de plus, c’est la classe INTERNATIONALE.
Tu entres dans l’histoire et tu te paies le luxe de prendre plusieurs portes …
Mais qu’est-ce qui fait marcher Sylvain ?
December 16th, 2010 at 8:05 am
Good Job！
December 16th, 2010 at 9:01 am
这也太NB了
December 16th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
Congratulations!!!
[36Kr观光团]
isme.tel
December 16th, 2010 at 5:32 pm
我也觉得楼主家祖坟冒青烟了
December 17th, 2010 at 1:44 am
et pendant ce temps là, on attend…
on attend juste qu’on s’occupe de nous, sur http://www.jamendo.com...
mais apparemment tout le monde est hyper-occupé…
je comprends…
:(
December 17th, 2010 at 4:27 am
gucci outlet
December 17th, 2010 at 9:30 am
Congratulation guys, you really earned the laptop.
December 17th, 2010 at 6:11 pm
I don’t know how you guys can sleep at night. Does this number mean anything to you? 191658240013351581180798819621
December 17th, 2010 at 6:12 pm
I don’t know how you guys can sleep at night. Does this number mean anything to you? 191658240013351581180798819621 ?
December 17th, 2010 at 7:05 pm
I don’t know how you guys can sleep at night. You have the wrong value for “C”. Check out this page ==> http://sites.google.com/site/notspeedanddestroy/
December 17th, 2010 at 10:36 pm
Don’t trust John, he can’t distinguish between a – (minus) and a * (times).
December 20th, 2010 at 2:50 am
I fail to see the advanced physics in the solution to this problem as an earlier user cited (only calculus). But congratulations. I would have never thought to solve anything in a video like that.
December 20th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
you are really awesome man just keep going and feed your brain in good things and i hope some big companies hire your hopefully !
December 22nd, 2010 at 1:08 am
Wow, i watched that video too but don’t know that was a real equation and can get a free laptop…
You are so cool…
December 24th, 2010 at 11:13 am
Amazing, well done! That’s sure some show of geniality :) Both you and Google!
December 27th, 2010 at 10:34 pm
Wow! great stuff.
it proves that treasure hunting is a lifestyle! :)
January 3rd, 2011 at 7:05 pm
Nice Trac tabs btw ;)
January 12th, 2011 at 9:55 am
伟大的中国人民发来贺电！
祝贺你！
January 12th, 2011 at 11:44 am
That’s sure some show of geniality :) Both you and Google!
January 30th, 2011 at 11:35 am
It seems that this may be inaccurate
sites.google.com/site/notspeedanddestroy/
January 30th, 2011 at 11:36 am
Basically, that the whole story may have been made up?
February 5th, 2011 at 11:17 pm
Nice one.
February 5th, 2011 at 11:28 pm
you are really awesome man just keep going and feed your brain in good things and i hope some big companies hire your hopefully
February 5th, 2011 at 11:29 pm
Really awesome,Congratzzz…
February 8th, 2011 at 5:18 pm
中国广西柳州发来贺电！！！
February 9th, 2011 at 6:26 am
想象力是无限的！
February 13th, 2011 at 2:11 pm
Hello all,
Very good and awesome problem :)
March 17th, 2011 at 7:39 am
Great Work. So finally laptop arrived ??.. Howz the look. We are waiting here eagerly to get the laptop to our hands too..
July 19th, 2011 at 3:46 pm
Great work. Congratulations! I hope they send it to you.
July 19th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
Congratulation guys, you really earned the laptop.
September 27th, 2011 at 8:13 pm
That would be the coolest things ever happened if I’m in your place right at that moment!!..hahaha.. and its looks like kind of a tremendous arithmetic’s problem.. =-= Well, You’re AWESOME, MAN!!