Hints (because I expect this to be extremely hard)
For a sense of how simple the program is, I generated the file with a python script of a similar length and complexity to the solution to the prior challenge.
Other than writing out to the file at the end, the generator uses only basic primitives of the python language (integer arithmetic, logic and flow control, arrays)
The only numeric constants used in the generator script are 0,1,2,2222.
The generator script takes nearly 10 minutes to run on my laptop!
So if you have any good hypotheses, you might want to test them with a compiled language for a 100-fold speedup over python.
Challenge: A Much More Alien Message
Since this challenge was solved pretty quickly, I thought I’d try to make a substantially more difficult program induction challenge.
The Challenge
Find a short program which generates this binary file.
Hints (because I expect this to be extremely hard)
For a sense of how simple the program is, I generated the file with a python script of a similar length and complexity to the solution to the prior challenge.
Other than writing out to the file at the end, the generator uses only basic primitives of the python language (integer arithmetic, logic and flow control, arrays)
The only numeric constants used in the generator script are 0,1,2,2222.
The generator script takes nearly 10 minutes to run on my laptop!
So if you have any good hypotheses, you might want to test them with a compiled language for a 100-fold speedup over python.