First Go challenge – binary decoding

The story in this challenge reminds me of one I heard from Peter Samson, one of the original MIT hackers who worked on their PDP-1, at the Computer History Museum. Back in the early 1960s Peter, a classical music buff and musician in his own right, wrote a four voice music synthesizer program [1] - one of the first ever written, I have to think - for the PDP-1 and arranged several classical and baroque pieces for it.

Sometime in the 2000s, I think, when the Computer History Museum was restoring its PDP-1, they stumbled on some tapes or something that held inputs - entire classical works like Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik - for Peter's synthesizer. Unfortunately they couldn't locate a copy of the synthesizer program itself but, being one of the OG hackers, Peter was able to examine the data on the tapes, reverse-engineer the data format he'd invented decades prior, and write a brand new synthesizer for the PDP-1 that was compatible with the original tapes. All of those adages about data structures being more important than code suddenly rang true in a very real way :-)

He told the story over a live demonstration of the PDP-1 playing music with his program - it's a wonderful experience and if you have the chance to see it, you shouldn't pass it up [2]. If you have a chance to see him at the Computer History Museum, don't pass it up! Steve Russell joins him with a Spacewar! demonstration (you get to play it!) and they're happy to answer questions and recount stories about their old days in the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club :-)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmony_Compiler

[2]: They have the PDP-1 demo on two days of every month, twice a day. http://www.computerhistory.org/hours/

Challenge author here. There is nothing Go specific to the challenge itself. I really want to encourage everyone to try solving the problem. If you don't like, know or care to learn Go, try solving the challenge using Rust, Ruby, Scala, Elixir, JS, Pascal, asm or whatever language you want to play with.

While only Go submissions will be evaluated and rewarded, I would personally be glad to look at solutions written in other languages.

I quickly looked over the challenge, and it looks neat.

I really like there's a test suite included, so you can very easily/quickly verify your solution solves the problem (and feel rewarded).

Organizer here. We definitely do require community help to build a submission mechanism. Anyone?

Would love to see some creative solutions to this problem :)

Never worked with binary files before...can anyone give me more hints to work with binary files in general?

Might want to change that one discount code not to be "byfag25."

better way to conduct challenge/competition http://www.codingame.com/home golang is officially available language..

And the prize for the best go code is... A bunch of books about learning go!

> Create a zip of your Go source code and send the zip file to gochallenge [at] joshsoftware.com by the 15th of the month (midnight IST, 11:30 AM PDT). No new solutions will be accepted after that.

Presumably, March 15?

Are there any bonus points for early submissions?