Belgian programmer solves MIT’s 20-year-old time capsule cryptographic puzzle

This week MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) announced that a 20-year-old cryptographic puzzle was just solved by a self-taught programmer from Belgium, 15 years earlier than MIT scientists expected. Bernard Fabrot spent the last three and a half years computing the solution to a puzzle first announced by MIT researchers in 1999. In the original announcement, LCS promised that, if a correct solution was uncovered, they would open a special “time capsule” designed by architect Frank Gehry and filled with historical artifacts from the likes of Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Source: www.csail.mit.edu