# Instructions

# ------------

# - Install python3, pyskein, and requests

# - Run this script with python3

#

# In latest Ubuntu / Debian / Mint:

# sudo apt-get install python3-dev python3-pip

# sudo pip-3.2 install requests

# sudo pip-3.2 install pyskein

# python3 calxkcd.py

from skein import skein256, skein512, skein1024

import requests

import random

import itertools

target = '5b4da95f5fa08280fc9879df44f418c8f9f12ba424b7757de02bbdfbae0d4c4fdf9317c80cc5fe04c6429073466cf29706b8c25999ddd2f6540d4475cc977b87f4757be023f19b8f4035d7722886b78869826de916a79cf9c94cc79cd4347d24b567aa3e2390a573a373a48a5e676640c79cc70197e1c5e7f902fb53ca1858b6'

alphabet = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789"

def get_random_string():

slen = random.randint(2, 200)

return ''.join(random.choice(alphabet) for _ in range(slen)).encode('ascii')

def hamming_dist(hex_str1, hex_str2):

return sum(map(str.__ne__, bytes1, bytes2))

best_dist = 1024

while True:

string = get_random_string()

h = skein1024(string)

dist = hamming_dist(h.hexdigest(), target)

if dist < best_dist:

best_dist = dist

print(string, dist)

# send to xkcd and print response (for sanity check)

r = requests.post("http://almamater.xkcd.com/?edu=berkeley.edu", data={'hashable': string})

print(r.content)