# Competition to celebrate new ao5 World Record. 500 USD prize pool

#### cubeshepherd

##### Member
So someone just guesses a random number, and you @kubesolver finds who has that number?

#### kubesolver

Prize number 4 goes to @Fred Lang ! Congratulations!

#### kubesolver

@cubeshepherd kinda. Did you read "boring technical details"?

#### cubeshepherd

##### Member
@cubeshepherd kinda. Did you read "boring technical details"?
I read it but I am a little confused to what it meant (and I am with pretty much anything that is lotto related like that). Sorry for not understanding.

e8268 prize 5

#### kubesolver

@cubeshepherd

I'll try to explain what I did.

I don't want to pick the prize myself, but instead make sure people can be sure it's a random draw and not me giving prizes to whoever I like. I don't know why I care about it but I do.

I have created several tickets, which basically are short pieces of text. e.g.

"kubesolver won the prize"
"cubeshepard won the prize haha"
"someone else won"

I could ask someone in the topic to pick one of these texts, but then it would be their preference and not a random choice. So what I did is that I applied a hashing function sha1 (google it up) to each of those pieces of texts and posted in the topic those hashes.

it's functionally the same as a person selecting a card with a name without being to read what is written on a card.

The hashing function has this property that it's super hard to reverse it. So if I will show now that
Code:
sha1("Batman123 1 ticket for participation. Prize 5)") = e8268
it means that this ticket indeed was for batman as I couldn't on the fly come up with other text that produces the same sha1.

This way the draw is fair unless I didn't collaborate with people drawing.

Now that the contest is over I could publish all texts for hashes if anyone wants to check me.

#### Batman123

##### Member
@cubeshepherd

I'll try to explain what I did.

I don't want to pick the prize myself, but instead make sure people can be sure it's a random draw and not me giving prizes to whoever I like. I don't know why I care about it but I do.

I have created several tickets, which basically are short pieces of text. e.g.

"kubesolver won the prize"
"cubeshepard won the prize haha"
"someone else won"

I could ask someone in the topic to pick one of these texts, but then it would be their preference and not a random choice. So what I did is that I applied a hashing function sha1 (google it up) to each of those pieces of texts and posted in the topic those hashes.

it's functionally the same as a person selecting a card with a name without being to read what is written on a card.

The hashing function has this property that it's super hard to reverse it. So if I will show now that
Code:
sha1("Batman123 1 ticket for participation. Prize 5)") = e8268
it means that this ticket indeed was for batman as I couldn't on the fly come up with other text that produces the same sha1.

This way the draw is fair unless I didn't collaborate with people drawing.

Now that the contest is over I could publish all texts for hashes if anyone wants to check me.

Yay!

#### cubeshepherd

##### Member
@cubeshepherd

I'll try to explain what I did.

I don't want to pick the prize myself, but instead make sure people can be sure it's a random draw and not me giving prizes to whoever I like. I don't know why I care about it but I do.

I have created several tickets, which basically are short pieces of text. e.g.

"kubesolver won the prize"
"cubeshepard won the prize haha"
"someone else won"

I could ask someone in the topic to pick one of these texts, but then it would be their preference and not a random choice. So what I did is that I applied a hashing function sha1 (google it up) to each of those pieces of texts and posted in the topic those hashes.

it's functionally the same as a person selecting a card with a name without being to read what is written on a card.

The hashing function has this property that it's super hard to reverse it. So if I will show now that
Code:
sha1("Batman123 1 ticket for participation. Prize 5)") = e8268
it means that this ticket indeed was for batman as I couldn't on the fly come up with other text that produces the same sha1.

This way the draw is fair unless I didn't collaborate with people drawing.

Now that the contest is over I could publish all texts for hashes if anyone wants to check me.

Aha, gotcha, that makes a lot more sense, ans thank you for explaining it. Very much appreciated and thank you again very much for hosting this event.

Additionally, congrats to @fun at the joy, @Batman123, and @Fred Lang on winning the lottery, and everyone else that won a prize.

#### Natanael

##### Member
Congratulations to the winners!