I found this secret code while geocaching. What could it mean? | Hacker News Reader

I found this secret code while geocaching. What could it mean?

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56 pointsearle18 comments

The comments were mostly nonsense, but there was one gem that made me laugh:

If you aren't a troll, then why were you beneath a bridge, smartguy?

That is funny, indeed!

I got down voted if I found this funny?

I didn't down vote you, but I'd imagine you got down voted for not adding to the conversation. Your reply was the same as "me too."

Just a guess however.

"The comments were mostly nonsense,"

You have accurately described the chief product of Reddit quite well.

...says the lad merrily prancing about on Hacker News.

Most likely answer so far:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/axth9/i_found_thi...

It's most likely a random number as it is in UUID version 4 format. The version identified by the 4 and the b in the correct spots "6d4061b1b-a7ee-4a9e-b0ae-509617252b42" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_Unique_Identifier#V...). Person who placed the geocache probably wanted a way to google anyone who found it.

UUID v4 seems kind of plausible, although it has no advantage at all over a random string if you just wanted to google. What is interesting is that caches on geocaching.com are identified by v4 UUIDs. But this one doesn't turn up anything. The person with the UUID idea has the number wrong, incidentally, it's

6d406b1b-a7ee-4a9e-b0ae-509617252b42

You can buy tiny magnetic geocaching containers on ebay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/SIX-Magnetic-Nano-TINY-Geocaching-Contai...

I doubt it's some spy thing.

Most likely someone wanted to set up a multicache where you had to decode something to get to the next cache but never bothered to finish it.

It could be a 'live' multicache, too. There are some pretty long ones (many km) and they usually only tell you the starting point, the other coordinates need to be deduced, which would explain why it's on no map.

I'd really like to see a Chi-square analysis on this by a smarter statistician than me. Power should be pretty low since you only have 16 bytes.

Alternatively, in a series of sixteen uniformly-distributed bytes, what's the probability that the birthday paradox doesn't occur? That is, the probability that no two bytes are identical?

I can say as someone who's played around with English-language markov chains for years that this definitely isn't displaying the characteristics of English text, even with transformations like rot13 or multiplication. So the next logical question is, "Is it uniform?"

How would you do a chi-square on this? Doesn't seem to me to be the right sort of test.

If you think its hex/ascii, you can try to do a hypothesis test on the max frequency of each digit/letter and see what happens there. But, for any test, you need an underlying model against which you test. What model are you thinking of?

Can someone explain why chi-square analysis would even be a useful thing to perform on this string?

Maybe the number is the location of some Loom assets: https://loom.cc/faq

Okay, that is a pretty cool system. Sad now that I don't know anyone involved, can't get an invite.

9d95c450c3a375a6d3f952b4b13b9f17

Sweet, thanks!

you have to md5 every possible earth coordenate pair. Thats the hash of the correct one. Piece of cake. So im not going to do it for you.

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