ImSci Intern Challenge #1

So almost a week ago now I teased the beginning of the ImSci Intern Challenge. As you'll notice on the "official" rules, solutions are due Fridays by 8:45A, so I had to wait until that time last week before I could safely divulge any information on the challenge lest I risk leaking any information to the competing interns. Now that Challenge #1 is safely behind us, I can now share some of its secrets - though not all of them, since parts of each challenge will repeat in each subsequent challenge.

For Challenge #1, interns were given a mock Archimedes Palimpsest that they had to use IMAGING SCIENCE techniques on to read the hidden message. Once discovered, they had to do what it said to a satisfactory degree as deemed by The Officials. If you read last week's blog, then you already know all this... So, now for the new stuff. Here's a scan of the document they had to image:

Scan mercilessly stolen from Denise's blog

The background text was magenta, and was printed over with perpendicular bold dark green Greek text. After printing out the sheet I tested out the challenge myself to make sure it was easily doable, and sure enough I was able to separate the text in a matter of a couple minutes with some not-so-clever image processing in ImageJ. The magenta text said:

To satisfactorily achieve this challenge you must prove that you used Imaging Science techniques to read the following message Unscramble this word: "SOTIARA" Once you have determined the password report on its significance to your officials to complete your mission This message will now repeat

The text was somewhat readable to the naked eye, hence the requirement of proving you used Imaging Science techniques. There were a lot of different approaches one could take, and awesomely enough it seems that pretty much all of the groups did something different. Two of my favorite examples are:

One group shone light through a Mountain Dew bottle to act as a green filter, and then did a little processing in Photoshop

Another group removed the green channel and inverted the image, and then utilized a little manual character recognition to make sure they didn't miss anything.

Once the text was readable, unscrambling "Astoria" and reporting on its significance wasn't too hard, so sure enough we had a few groups complete the challenge in a matter of hours. So then, most of the groups actually went about translating the Greek overlay text, which I didn't think anyone would be motivated enough to do. There was one team who came through with this before the end of the day Tuesday, and translated the whole thing by hand (after optical character recognition didn't work - major props on the attempt). You should totally read Henry's blog about it, because it does a good job of illustrating the passion the interns have for the challenge and the positive impacts it has on them.

I told the teams they could get extra bonus points if they figured out where the text came from, which as it happens was here. I initially used this text because it was a long chunk that I could easily copy/paste, but I later realized the added advantage that by including it as a bonus puzzle, a bunch of kids would actually be forced to read it word for word (...and how many people do you think actually have ever read that much of that text? How much did YOU read?). Hopefully they paid a little attention to the words they were translating and it helped them discover more about Imaging Science at RIT. 

At the conclusion of Challenge #1, with bonus points and handicaps all accounted for, there are 6 interns tied for first place with 0 points; 2 with 1 point; 2 with 2 points; 2 with 6 points; and 2 with 10 points, because they blew off the challenge entirely and were penalized with the max. But at this point, it is still totally anyone's game.

I was really impressed by what the interns proved themselves to be capable of with the challenge this week. I think it was a great experience both socially (Sadie's blog has a good example of this) and educationally, while maintaining some playfulness (In Christina's words, "it's quite a lot of fun."). I am looking forward to the next few weeks of challenges, and hope the positive effects we witnessed this week don't diminish. Hopefully the enthusiasm over the game doesn't wane, because right now it's pretty high and gives everyone a little something to be excited about. I know the anticipation of the release of Challenge #2 was pretty high on Friday, but that's for another blog post to get into...