Dec 11, 2010 11:55 GMT  ·  By

Part of the big Chrome OS push, Google released an interesting video showing how, even if your Cr-48 netbooks is set on fire or pierced by a garden gnome, all of your data and work is safe in the cloud. It was an interesting way to showcase one of the big advantages of living on the web, but there was a hidden challenge in the video for the eagle-eyed geeks out there.

At one point in the video, at around 2:24, there are several equations on a board behind the scientist. Most people wouldn't even notice this or if they noticed they wouldn't pay any attention to it.

Others though would see them and say, "now there's something interesting, I wonder if they mean anything." And that's what Google was hoping for, since the equations were actually part of a puzzle the geeks over at Google created for some other geeks to crack.

The equations themselves aren't that advanced, if you've got a bit of a background in math. Or you could simply use the all-mighty Wolfram Alpha to parse them, which is what the ones that solved the puzzle did.

Once you've solved all of the equations, you get the following answers: G = 900.91; C = 8335727; H = 269462689; R = 222647; O = 694079; M = 552.

Replace them in the final equation, X = G / (C*H*R*O*M - 3), and you get 900.91 / 191605050401140404051920181525.

At this point you're kind of stuck. There seems to be a code behind the numbers, but it's not completely obvious.

Here's what Sylvain Zimmer, the founder and CTO of the music and streaming site Jamendo, the one that actually solved the puzzle first, though once he got to this point.

"All we got was X = 90091/191605050401140404051920181525 ~= 4.7*10^-27 and we were not even sure of this one number because of barely readable numbers in the original video," Zimmer writes.

"The first path we explored was in Physics, 1.66*10^-27 being the atomic mass constant u. Having X=2.83u didn’t make much sense: too far from 2.0x or 3.0x where the closest element I knew are.

"Then my friend Joachim Rambeau tipped me off with an idea on “Chrome UX” being the name of the team that released the video. There was an X in there! With the equation X=(U/Chrome), U being the mass of uranium (~238u depending on isotopes) and 'Chrome' the mass of Cr-48 or related isotopes, we found ourselves very close to the 4.7 ballpark. I posted this as a comment in the video, without much hope of it being the definite answer," he said.

The interesting part is that he was actually complicating things way too much. The answer was much simpler and easier to spot.

"Anyway, while having drinks at the office at the end of the day (Yes, Jamendo is almost as cool to work at as Google ;-) , we realized '900.91' did actually reference the goo.gl url shortener.

"The division obviously meant a slash in an URL, and then we had to make sense of the 191605050401140404051920181525 to find an URL. But the excitation was growing, we knew we were on the right path this time!," he said.

At this point, it was simply a matter of converting the long string of numbers into letters. Google actually used the simplest code out there, each pair of numbers represents a letter in the Latin alphabet, A=1, B=2 and so on.

So the code actually spelled out goo.gl / s p e e d a n d d e s t r o y. If you had been the first to figure this out, following that address would have led you to a form for a brand new Cr-48 Chrome OS netbook.

The team at Jamendo was the first to crack it and have won one of Google's new netbooks. Since the team is in Europe, this particular Cr-48 will be one of the few if not the only one in the old continent for the time being.

Photo Gallery (2 Images)

The equations in the Google Chrome video
The form for the Google Chrome Cr-48 netbook prize
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