ImSci Intern Challenge #3 Recap: Strange Case

With today came the conclusion to ImSci Intern Challenge #3, and I am happy to report that all of the interns completed it (as they should have - this one was definitely not as tricky as last week's). This may be my favorite challenge so far because not only was it fun for us to make, but it also required the interns to have to make something as well - so instead of the usual decode/find/figure out X, this time there was also the requirement to create something of their own.

So you may have noticed a somewhat random blog post last week called "Butterface", and if you follow my Twitter as well you may have noticed some pretty random tweets. These were actually all of the clues for this week's challenge, with the intention of getting the interns to connect with my twitter/blog. To describe the rest of the challenge, I refer you now to this video just made by Kyle in the late hours of last night to describe the process he used:

As it turns out, there was actually another solution - BY BEATING THE SYSTEM! To explain, I'll just borrow Kaila's write up from her blog (since she did such an excellent job; btw, the links are worth clicking.):

Once upon a time...

Just kidding.

Well I'll admit, we certainly started off completely clueless. For the longest time I honestly didn't even know what the goal was. This lead to completely random searches and evidently interesting videos, like such: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZElqfHyjMw. Fascinating as this was, we were prettyyyy sure that was not the solution. Deciding to take the fact that we needed info from the last challenge in mind, we thought maybe we would use third eye for another watermark. With this in mind, we went to the CIS website. Having already figured out that sailvu topcreepin was clearly visual perception, we searched such in the link. The internet hated that, and nothing appeared for whatever reason. So instead, we tried just perception. Lo and behold! We found the page: http://www.cis.rit.edu/nomoregreek! This was clearly the end of the challenge, once we made the image that is. When we went to make sure photoshop was an okay program to use, however, we were informed that we had beat the system! Alas, this in itself was not impressive enough, so we proceeded to attempt to figure out how we were SUPPOSED to get there. Ice mark, the blatant hint, lead us to another watermark program! (this was after the discovery of a random physicsist mountain climber author of course). Oddly enough, finding the image was the hardest park. We had attempted to use the hybrid Bethany-Bob, but it didn't work. With the gracious help of Bethany, however, we realized this was because we weren't creative enough with the settings on the left. Seeing that a key may be necessary, and knowing that we were probably looking for the URL to the page we accidentaly found, I switched the setting to text and tried a few different passwords, butterface and icycle included. Then I realized we had yet to (properly) use the visual perception hint. Excitment making hearts race and adrenaline pumping, my fingers flew over keys to pound in the 17 characters, everyone staring at the screen in anticipation....VIOLA! The key appeared! We had beat the system AND followed the rules to complete the challenge!
It was then cake to use photoshop to make the image, a high pass filter was applied to Maddie's face and a gaussian blur to mine. The high pass filter was also set as an overlay, and then merged on top of the gaussian image, creating the beauty that I have attatched for you.

And that is the thrilling and exciting tale of how we completed the challenge.

Also Sadie helped a lot.

The end!

 For the record, the "gracious help" from me referenced above was given in return for this bribe:

Some kind of brownie cupcake deliciousness with a peanut butter cup in the middle. A-MAZING.

So it's not like I'm SUCH a corrupt Official that I give out hints and play favorites - I am only so corrupt that I reward bribery. ;-)

At any rate, here are the hybrid images as created by the interns:

Denise + David
Note the Icemark Trial Version watermark - They sent me back a steganograph with the phrase, "bethany is awesome!!!" encrypted in it!

Kaila + Maddie

Henry + Christina

Nick + Sadie

Olivia + Brennan

This would have been Kyle + Mike but Mike was out on vacation, so it's just two faces of Kyle.

Jarek + Cassie

Which one is your favorite? (We picked Denise and David's as the "best".)

 

As it turns out, this is the last challenge to be performed in teams. We were going to have one more team challenge, but I have been so busy all week with the Urban League on top of everything else that I haven't had time to develop another problem to solve. Also, the final challenge will be pretty time consuming, so we've decided to give the interns two weeks to work on it. So at this point, it's still anybody's game - especially because they have complete control of their own destiny now (challenge-wise). So, it's on to the fourth and final challenge (which I am going to go post right now)...