It took me a while to figure out what was going on with this punch card. I assumed that they would expect me to have access to an old style computer or card reader. And I wasn’t about to use a key punch to actually duplicate the pattern on the card to see if it meant anything. The old “work smarter, not harder” eventually paid off. It wasn't until I was staring at it and noticed how the top couple of rows looked like binary, just 0's and 1's, that I figured it out. The whole damn thing is a string of binary code:
011000010110111000100000011001010111100001110000
011001010111001001101001011011010110010101101110
011101000010000001101001011011100010000001110011
011001010111001001100101011011100110010001101001
01110000011010010111010001111001
If you decode the binary into the alphabet, you get:
An experiment in serendipity
After a crazy amount of searching, I figured out that the phrase is what this scientist Dennis Gabor called his work. He’s known as the Father of Holography and he even has a his face on a stamp. In Hungary, but still. I want my own stamp. Gots to get me one of those.
Anyway, so I respond with saying “Dennis Gabor” and “holography.” Then I get another reply (at this point I’m both intrigued and a little annoyed).
Who was responsible for taking Gabor’s work into another dimension and what was required for him to do it?
More searching. I reply back with “Dr. Emmet Leith” and “lasers.” This was pretty much the last puzzle I was going to solve. After that, I finally got the “send us your resume” and the next day I got a call. How’s that for a pre-screener? Crazy, right? And I’ve been hearing about some developer challenge in the works so I bet these guys aren’t done. They are trying to out Microsoft Microsoft and out Google Google.
Job: check. Now to get to those other pesky items.
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