Interview with horst35

First of all, thanks to horst35 for agreeing to the interview.

Three years have passed since the last entry. Though several things did happen during this period of time, there wasn't a compelling reason to update.

Recently, horst35 completed all the 299 challenges. And so came the impetus for a new entry.

[interview begin]

Let me begin by stating that I don't particularly like the idea of unnecessarily bloated exhibition of character. In the challengesphere, too much attention is sometimes paid to individual egos and I don't want to encourage this kind of attitude, prone to being fertile grounds for arrogance and ignorance.

How did you discover Rankk?

By word-of-mouth transmission from skraeling.

Why horst35?

Names are just names... 

Which challenge did you like most at Rankk and why?

Too many ingenious ones to name a single. In no particular order: Read the signs, Disguise, Signal to noise, Rotten, Incipit Matthaeus, The Sphinx crypto, Wildlife, Letterboxes, Time for church, Exorcism, Did I mension?, Fragmentary, Dice Rolls, Jackpot, Play fair dude, Fences, M13, ..., and most recently Blimp.

Name one challenger you admire most at Rankk. Why?

Shortbreak for his perseverance.

Do you play other challenge sites?

No.

How did it feel like to have completed all the challenges? The remark "Now I can die in peace" sounds... interesting.

As one grows older, one feels the grave coming closer. It feels good to have finished at least one of the things you've started.

What is your favourite food?

Erythropoietin, nerve growth factor, and other neurotrophins.

[/interview end]

Rankk the garden

What has a garden got to do with a challenge site? A lot, haha.

I have had that title in mind for quite a while, but hadn't got the inspiration to write anything. I suppose I caught the bug from Kender, who found inspiration to make a Javascript challenge for Rankk.

So what about the garden? Ah, certainly not because Rankk looks *beautiful*, though I think it does look quite attractive with the reddened Pyramid contrasting with the mostly darkened background.

No, not the appearance.

I was thinking about Rankk as a garden in having a variety of challenges and the process in which the variety was made possible, just like a garden has an assortment of plants and flowers and the process in which the assortment was acquired.

Imagine a garden where you're not just a passive admirer of the plants and flowers, but where you're allowed to bring in your own plants and orchids and put them in the garden so that other visitors can admire them.

Over time, instead of seeing only Oncidium orchids - the ones that live on trees and are the most common - you will also see rare orchids found only on rocky outposts and forest floors.

Wouldn't that be great?

This is what has been happening in Rankk. Sure, most players are quite happy to just solve the challenges and make the climb. And that's perfectly ok. After all, no one is expected to have to contribute any idea or challenge in order to play.

But Rankk has been lucky. There have been a few who have not only played the games exceptionally well but who have also introduced new and novel challenges to Rankk. To date, 69 of the 261 challenges were made of ideas and challenges contributed by Rankk's members. Consequently, there's a greater variety and depth in the challenges.

Ultimately, everyone gains. As caretakers of the "garden", we're rewarded with a sense of satisfaction seeing it grow and and prosper. As players of the site, the benefits are the greater variety and substance of the challenges.

Do you have a plant or flower of your own to offer to the world through the garden Rankk?

Who plays Rankk?

Rankk is approaching two years. With nearly 250 challenges, it's - I venture to say - one of the bigger challenge sites out there. In fact, Rankk has consistently received a high ranking at Wechall, a global challenger tracking site.

Not all the challenges were coded by us. About one fifths of that number were ideas or whole challenges contributed by our members.

Great thanks to them!

The next target is 300, another 50 challenges to go. After that, we'll aim for 500 challenges - a massive leap of 200 more challenges. A tall order but we'll make that the end point. Seriously, we don't think anyone - not even horst35, quangntenemy or mithmith, the current top three, can complete the entire journey. But that's the challenge for them :)

For us, the challenge is to continually keep the site relevant, not just by adding new challenges but also by adding new features and improving existing ones.

The membership now stands at 1477, averaging about two members per day. Passable, I guess, but nothing like what we were expecting.

But, while the numbers are important, they aren't necessarily a blessing. As one member pointed out, it's the quality of the members rather than the quantity. No point having a large membership but a low retention rate.

He's a point. A number of members have been with Rankk since it was started. And then there are those who return to the site intermittently with fresh ideas to solve a challenge or when there's time to spare.

Lately, the question of who Rankk attracts crossed my mind. With a variety of challenge types - mathematics, logic, puzzle, CGI security, programming, cryptography, steganography - there's surely something for anyone who has come to the site, whether by chance or through word of mouth.

The people who enjoy Rankk are people who have a knack for solving. These are people who probably see and write code every day. People steeped in mathematics tend to do well too, as logic, programming and cryptography are all related to the field of mathematics.

And related to the who is the why. Why do people play Rankk? Is it a site for the bored - so the objective is to pass time? Or is it a site to feel challenged - so the objective is to rise to the top?

It's probably to be a combination of factors. But one thing is for sure: Rankk is about challenging your brain.

A member has found it to be a "good method" to kill time.

Если кто еще не знает --- http://www.rankk.org/ --- хороший способ поубивать время и поупражнять свой разум.

Rocky July

Two noteworthy episodes happened in the early part of July.

horst35 overtook quangntenemy to take the top spot. I had thought that was near impossible, but horst35 had done it, albeit briefly. quangntenemy reclaimed the title a couple of days later. And peace ensues :D

The other was a little hiccup in the short existence of Rankk. The server went down due to a faulty harddisk. It has occasionally gone down, so we thought nothing of it.

But the bad news came. Some data had been lost and could not be recovered completely.

It was not one or two days' worth of data, but four, which was pretty bad. Fortunately, there weren't a lot of activities during those four days, so the loss wasn't that damaging. But it was enough to drive a member away, because he had solved 18 challenges during that time and was unwilling to redo them.

We need knocks like that, don't we? That very day, we wrote a script to automatically backup the more time-sensitive parts of the database, such as points and hofs.

So that was rather happening...

Meanwhile, an interesting question was raised by shortbreak. He asked whether it was possible to enable SSL for Rankk's login. I had toyed with that possibility in the past but had never found out the cost and the how.

I was somewhat dismayed to learn that we would need an IP and an SSL certificate to have SSL enabled.

The IP costs S$10 per month and the SSL certificate costs US$140 per year, or about S$210. That's S$330 per year, which is a pretty hefty sum.

We would love to have it but at the moment it's beyond our means ;)

Does anybody know of a cheaper way to do it?

The Caesum interview

First of all, many thanks to Caesum for taking time to do the interview.

I knew Caesum from the Pyramid era.  I had written to him requesting for a link to be added to his site Electrica, which he kindly did. That link is now changed to Rankk.

Caesum is a familiar figure in the challenge community. In many challenge sites, you are likely to see him at or near the top of the ranking table.

Without much ado, let's begin the Caesum interview.

How would you describe your Rankk journey so far?

Well, I had a real burst of enthusiasm at the beginning, which is pretty much the same as anything I start. It's difficult to keep that enthusiasm going though without the feeling that solving levels is becoming a chore, a task, or simply another job. Sometimes you need to take a rest and walk away from the computer for a bit and come back at some later point.
I work with computer systems all day long, primarily writing SQL and building reports for people, so after a long day at work it's difficult to maintain any kind of enthusiasm to sit at a computer for even longer still. Some people seem to be able to solve problems from sites at work, unfortunately I do not have that opportunity although I can write the occasional short script in my lunchtime (although I can't run them....).

Anyway, I took my time with most of the Rankk levels, climbing slowly from one to the next, and savouring the climb, but also knowing that I'd pick up a bit of speed towards the end when only higher level ones were left. I then shot past a lot of people on the rankings because I was solving the easier high point levels.

Eventually you reach a point where there are still a few left to solve and you really slow down. I was left with about 30 at one point and then started a more thorough approach to the remaining ones, but I've not finished and there are one or two that I know how to solve but don't have the time at the moment.

So, in summary, I'd describe my journey like a rocket - starting out fast, suddenly shooting by and then coming to an abrupt halt!

A member is puzzled that you haven't beaten the Geb level. What do you say?
Naturally, the higher you get with any challenge site the more time you need to put in to solve the higher levels. The first part of the Geb challenge took about five minutes. The second part obviously needs some research but to be honest after a couple of hours of wandering the internet I became bored and let it be for a bit.

That about sums up many challenges for me, as soon as I become bored I start to lose interest. Take the proxy challenge, for example. It's easy to know what to do but it's so boring doing it and it can take so long that I quickly become bored and start to look around at other things.

If there's any feature that you would like to see added to Rankk, what would it be?
I've already made a few suggestions whilst chatting to Sphinx but if you want me to come up with something on the spot then I'll come up with the following: Many challenge sites in the past have purported to be about learning: "don't talk about the levels because you need to learn it." Cyberarmy was very much like this and yet most of these sites do not really have the resources for new people to learn anything. The result is that many newbies quickly get bored and leave and only a small core make progress and contribute to the community. So...... well, read the next section cos I'm using most of my new ideas there......

What are your plans for Electrica? 
Well, Electrica is currently undergoing a complete rewrite. Electrica had a few problems not least of which was an exploit released that pretty much made it all pointless. It had a couple of annoying bugs and it was really all down to the speed with which it was written in. The original Electrica took about two weeks to write, pretty much in full, and not much was added afterward for the next..... 5 years or so! ? I anticipate that the new site will be finished in September.

E2 will be based around sets of tutorials with accompanying levels, but don't expect it to be too easy. I've set out this time to make the new site far more secure. The database has been redesigned and I've already implemented a fair bit of it. The logging in and out system is written, the basic forums are written, some problems are done, some of the basic ranking work, etc. I still have an awful lot left to do though with some vast plans incorporating many things. Hopefully all of the features that I have planned will make it into the first release but pretty much everything is going to be different to the original. There are certainly more plans aimed at more of a community in the pipeline.

As to what will happen to the original, maybe something similar to the Rankk archive. It won't be possible to really port things over due to the extensive changes taking place. I had been feeling for a long time that it had become outdated and was in need of a major revamp, but due to real life problems of divorce and near bankruptcy, development came to a halt.

Anyway, the rewrite is also the main reason that I've pretty much stopped progress on Rankk for the moment.

Challenge sites tend to go through a path of Introduction, Growth, Maturity and Decline. What's your view on that?
You missed rebirth in your list. But, yes, I've seen many sites go this way. That's why I'm redesigning Electrica with hopefully more of a community focus, and why I'm also trying to make it more interesting for newbies to get into the challenge scene. Originally I wrote the challengers handbook with the soul aim of trying to get more people into the community as a whole, but this time I'm taking it one step further.

Do you consider yourself a hacker?
Well, let me tell you a little story. I went to University to do Pure Maths, and I was very good. I played about on Dec-PDP's and VAX systems and I started to get to know operating systems inside out. Then I got my girlfriend pregnant and found myself with no grant and had to leave. I had really good A-levels but I couldn't get a job anywhere, noone wanted to know because I hadn't finished my degree. Then I got a job in insurance and was made redundant two years later. (Shit, life had never been that easy for me - we lived on mostly potatoes for eight months but that's another story!).

Anyway, I got another job working in finance and they implemented this new system. To say the system was awful was an understatement and it was running on some mainframe and kept dropping you to an OS prompt, it was VMS at the time. Now I knew OS's inside out and sent someone a message on his terminal along the lines of 'this is crap, keeps dropping me out'. So he says 'how did you do that?' and I said 'oh just type.... and so on' and then people started saying 'what else can you do...'. I showed them how to play games on it, I showed them how to increase their privilege levels, I showed them how insecure the system was and I even put in a backdoor account with full privilege levels (like root).

So, everything was fine and then one day I was off and my boss walks into the office and says to my friend 'we're in deep trouble. Mrs x has forgotten her password and it'll take three weeks to reset if we phone the regional centre and we need to make some payments'. So he says 'I can do that.......' and so he did. The only problem was that Mrs x hadn't forgotten her password, she had forgotten her username and so my friend resets the password of Mrs x at some other office and then she makes millions of pounds of transfers from the wrong account.

So the end result was that everyone was in deep shit, and especially me. My boss took early retirement due to ill health. Everyone at work was interrogated. My friend and me were suspended for three months (nice holiday) and then summoned for the results. I was found guilty of running 23 privileged commands (I don't think the logs were that good as it was probably much more). Luckily my union rep saved the day and we both got permanent written warnings (the first in history!). My friend was at his terminal about a month later and nothing was working. He types a stupid message on the screen like 'i'm bored this isn't working' (bearing in mind this is a dumb terminal and connected to nothing) and the next thing he knows someone sees it over his shoulder, he's marched from the building and sacked on the spot.

After this I was real careful with computers at work, I've seen many people get away with far more than my friend was sacked for, and these days the whole scene has changed a lot.

I can tell you this though, if it wasn't for my own stupidity I'd probably have a damn better job now. It took me years to regain any kind of respectability and I'd made a major enemy of the HR person involved. There was no way of getting a good reference and she wanted me out of the organisation. I stuck my head down and worked hard for years gaining the respect of the finance and HR and several other directors. At one point I applied for a promotion and the original HR person tried to stop it. This ended up in a stand up argument with the finance director and guess what? She ended up taking an early retirement. Eventually the finance director tore up the bit of paper with my permanent written warning on it.

So, am I a hacker? Not anymore, in the sense of the word that most people understand but to me a hacker is someone that will solve one of your level5 programming levels in under half an hour through knowledge, rewriting and hacking together pieces of code with anything from asm to PHP, from C to Java, from Forth to Perl. A hacker can learn a new language whilst writing a program, and yeah that would still be me!

How is a typical day like for you in Nottingham?

A typical day? Depressing. I hate my job, it's boring, I need change to motivate me and keep me interested in what I do, I need to be continually learning. And at the moment I'm not doing that so work, travel, it's all tedious and boring. The only thing it does at the moment is pay the bills, and even this doesn't seem as important anymore after going through the events of the last couple of years.

One day you think you're doing alright and everything seems to be fine and you're going to live a good life, and drift into old age. The next you're bankrupt, no longer own a house and can no longer afford to buy one because prices have risen so much. The person that you trusted has seriously let you down and you'll probably never be back to where you once were. It makes you rethink about life and what it's all about.

So at the moment, I'm busy, busy rewriting my site, rethinking my life, and looking for an opportunity to do something better. I spend as much time as I can on my own computer doing exactly what I want to do, and at work I work whilst other people play on the internet.

Is there anything that you particularly like or dislike?
I like creativity, I like to see original things and originality, whether that's a new and original challenge level or whether it's an interesting piece of art. My favourite artists - Giger and Dali for example are both incredibly original and different. I like people that have had the guts and beliefs to do something different with their lives and not waste their time in a dead end job in a rat race.

What do I dislike? My job for one thing. To me it's always been a bit of a secondary thing anyway. For those who know me, and probably noone reading this will, I've always been a bit different. Long hair, biker, heavy rock. I listen to Slayer and ride an 1100cc bike. Perhaps not your picture of who I am!

What's your favourite sport?
Actually I hate sport. A better question would be 'what is my most disliked sport?' to which the answer would be football (soccer to you Americans....). I really do not see why so many people get so worked up about sport, it holds no interest for me whatsoever. I like to see a good competition between good players but I can as happily watch the WWE wrestlers which is 95% fake (not so different to some of the football players rolling about on the pitch crying like babies, i.e. fake).

Thanks to quangntenemy for helping with some of the interview questions.

Is Rankk profitable?

Recently, the subject of "profitability" came up over a chat between mithmith and me. mithmith thought that Rankk was profitable to the tune of USD 100 Adsense revenue per month and therefore quite "rewarding".

Wow, if only that were true!

First, let me stress that the idea of "making money" wasn't our motivation for Rankk right from the start. We were looking for a bit of fun, excitement and learning. So far, those elements are there and therefore we're quite happy and motivated to keep it going.

Having said that, we would of course be happier and more excited if Rankk were able to generate some form of revenue.

To date, we have spent a total of S$520 for Rankk's hosting and domain name. The current hosting plan and domain name will run till 16 April 2010, which means from now till then, we don't expect to be spending any more money on the site.

And as far as "revenues" go, we've collected a total of S$194 from the donations and Google ads:

Donations: USD 97.09 (S$132.311)
Google ads: approx S$62

So Rankk isn't profitable, in case you're curious :P In fact, we're incurring a deficit of S$328.

Will Rankk explode?

Recently, ozehka asked about what we plan to do so that Rankk will not "explode" because of too many challenges.

The timing of the question could not have been more apt, because I have been thinking about that too.

First of all, we need to answer the questions whether we plan to keep on adding new challenges and whether there's a maximum number we're targetting at.

I haven't discussed these with Bio so the views expressed here are my own.

Yes, we plan to keep on adding new challenges. We have not set a maximum number of challenges and we don't intend to do so.

So it's quite conceivable that in time, Rankk will grow quite monstrous with very many challenges. Will it crumple under its very own weight?

Here are some potential problems:

1) New comers may get discouraged or overwhelmed by the sheer size, even before they start.

2) With no end-point in sight, players may lose the momentum eventually, no matter how determined they were at the beginning.

3) It becomes harder to keep track of challenges so some ideas may inevitably be duplicated.

So what are our plans to ensure that the size won't become a burden to Rankk?

Firstly, we'll be careful not to pursue a numbers' game. This means we'll need to be selective about new challenge ideas that are proposed, and only add those that are good and relevant to the site.

Secondly, we may need to modify the challenge listing to display only a default number of challenges so as not to "frighten off" new comers. Or we may introduce categories to the challenges and let players select what categories of challenges to display.

Thirdly, at some point in time we'll need to audit the challenges and get rid of those that are "insane" or grossly unpopular.

Finally, we will need to constantly make improvements and introduce new features to keep the site relevant.

Focus on aesthetics

In the last couple of weeks, we busied ourselves with small improvements here and there. In the early stages, the more urgent task was to create new challenges. But after we crossed the 150 level, the pace of adding new challenges slowed somewhat, not because we grew tired of adding new ones, but because good ideas were drying up. Consequently, we have had more time to focus on Rankk's other aspects.

1) Ranking page

This has been improved to highlight the particular member's row when he or she is viewing the page and to indicate with up an arrow members who have solved a challenge in the last 5 days.

2) HOFs

Upgraded to include pagination. Previously, only the latest 200 solvers where listed. You had no way of locating the older solvers, which is really uncool.

3) Incoming messages

An earlier attempt at using an applet from the old Cyberarmy to "type" out the news didn't work well, because some members experienced page loading problem. So we did away with this feature until recently, when we found a cool way of doing it with Javascript.

So now every level has a specific incoming message to provide a context to the sacred journey, as well as to give a little expectation of what is to come in the next level.

4) Look and feel

The most noticeable is the masthead. For a long time, the Rankk logo was a tiny little image positioned on the left of the top panel, which is about 800 x 30. The new logo is many times bigger and, imho, nicer. Hopefully that will do a little magic to attract more new members.

And after all the hard work, we were pleasantly surprised with two donation emails . Hurray! Thanks to the kind souls out there!

PageRank of 4!

Yay! Rankk made it to a PageRank of 4 :)

It's definitely a pat on the back for us, in addition to the increasing membership and the kind donations we've received.

In case you're wondering what this PR thing is, it's Google’s system for ranking web pages. A page with a higher PR is deemed more important and is more likely to be listed in Google's search results above a page with a lower PR.

The PR value is viewable from Google's Toolbar, if you've one installed. Otherwise, there are many sites that let you calculate a site's PR value. Here's one: Rankwhere.

So what does a PR of 4 really mean?

Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot wrote an interesting guide about the importance of PR. He gave an idea of what PR values mean by dividing them into these broad categories:

0-3: New sites or sites with very minimal links.
4-5: Popular sites with a fair amount of inbound links.
6: Very popular sites that have hundreds of links, many of them quality links.
7-10: Usually media brands (NYTimes.com), big companies or A-list bloggers.

Wow, Rankk is a popular site :)

Our wishlist for 2008

I should have written this at the start of the new year, but I was bitten by a rare procrastination bug that was hard to fix :P

Fortunately, the Rat came and ate the bug alive. And so here I am, with a renewed motivation and energy to write about what we wish for in 2008:

1. An average of 5 new members per day. Currently, the average is about 2 per day based on a total of 1035 members and a span of 485 days.
2. 200 challenges. Rankk now has 171 challenges, so that's another 29 to be coded, or contributed.
3. A Google Pagerank of 4. We achieved a pagerank of 3/10 within a year and we're quite happy with that. 4 should be achievable but 5 is even better :)
4. More people blogging about Rankk or linking to Rankk.
5. More Google ad clicks and more donations :) So far, we have collected about 295 clicks totalling $52.36 and two Paypal donations .
6. More "missing" members returning. Two members came to mind: Intelos and Spoodle58. They reappeared after a long absence.

Wish us success!

End of year update

My last entry was October 2, slightly over two months back. Not too bad by my own standard :)

In between, we published three interviews by our members. I'm happy we did that, because not only are the interviews an excellent way of introducing some of our best members, they are also permanent records of the members and Rankk's journey. Five or 10 years down the road, I imagine it would be quite interesting to revisit the entries and make sense of the passing time.

The number of challenges now stands at 164, an addition of 46 more since my post "Half a year later..." in September, in which I wrote that we had increased the number of challenges from a mere 40 to 118. The number has somewhat stabilized, with a new challenge added every once in a while, when good ideas come by.

I remember we used to add at least a challenge every day, sometimes even two on the same day. It was crazy. There were days when I would eat, drink and sleep with challenge ideas haunting me, until I finally settled on a good one to start coding.

Over the last week, we introduced a profile feature to enable members to check each other's progress, besides finding out about his or her default profile information, such as date joined, blog or favourite site, country, etc.

It's a useful feature to have, all thanks to silverknight who gave us the timely nudge.

The right panel has also been given a little facelift. We moved some of the elements around and restyled a couple of them. The net effect is a more attractive right panel (to me at least). And unless you make the changes, you sometimes make the mistake of thinking that what you have is already good enough, when in fact it can be improved.

And while I am on the subject of changes, let me rant a little about what I think keeps a website going.

A website or blog is like a tree or pond that attracts different creatures to it. As long as the tree is alive and growing, it will attract visitors: insects, bees, birds, butterflies and what have you. And these visitors will bring their friends and relatives along, who in turn will bring other friends and relatives along. Sure, many of these new comers will be casual visitors. But while they are there, they help to make the soil fertile with their droppings and with the dispersal of seeds when they move on. And some of those who came will become permanent residents of the tree.

The opposite happens when the tree shows no sign of life. Its inhabitants will forsake it in search of greener pastures to look for food and a new home. The number of visitors will dwindle as there's nothing to look forward to. Very soon, the entire community will disappear, leaving behind a forlorn, lifeless tree.

A website exhibits that sort of phenomenon. Just like the tree, the more it can keep itself alive and vibrant, the more visitors it can attract. The more visitors it can attract, the more it can sustain itself.

We want Rankk to be a thriving tree. In its short existence of one year and two months, we've never stopped making changes and adding new stuff. As one member remarked: "you can rest assured that the changes made since I was active are adequate.. oh yeah most adequate ;-)".

We believe, and hope, these changes will help Rankk attract new members while allowing it to stay relevant to the mature members.

Have a blessed Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Interview with Sapr0

This is the final instalment of Rankk's interviews for 2007.

We thank Sapr0, who's rankked #2 at the point of writing, for taking part in this interview.

Sapr0 shared his thoughts and views freely. He even let on a little about what his girlfriend thinks about his online life.

Read on...

You've been playing this sort of games for quite a while...tell us about your experience.

Well I started with some random googling and found CyberArmy. I got all intrigued by the supposedly "hacking" things one would learn.

I thought I was "kool" when I solved the first JavaScript level. But I got stopped by eliza (a chat bot) and went on googling for other sites.

The second site I found was HackQuest where I managed to solve a couple more of JS challenges and Logic ones.

The third site was the Pyramid. It was all good and nice up till level 3, when I got stuck and went back to HQ. After a month of learning to solve challenges, I returned to the Pyramid and progressed to Geb rapidly with a bit of hints here and there along the way.

Eventually I started to solve tons of sites, including TBS, Slyfx, Arcanum and Xavier.

What is your programming language of choice and why do you choose it over others?

My first learned language was Pascal, then in high school I learned C++ while using a old compiler Borland C++ V3.1.

In my first year at the university, I started to learn PHP and MySQL to create my own site, and I got hooked on PHP. Simple syntax, tons of functions available and a 13-mb installer to use it on any comp.

When it comes to brute forcing or cracking hashes, I usually use specialized tools or resort to my C++ old compiler and write a quick program.

Your girl friend...does she ever complain about your online life?

Sometimes...yes, but we already had a conversation about it when we first met.

I made her understand that the computer and the internet things I do (solving challenges, playing games) are like small habits of mine, though I think her impression was more like "vices" :)

When I'm really really close to solving a challenge, she usually let me finish it, and then we go cuddle. But if I'm far away...I usually drop it and prefer to stay with my "woman"...ya know ;)

Are you vying for the top spot at Rankk?

Yes, why not. Who would not want to be #1 :) Though beating quangntenemy is very hard, he got skills :)

If you were to rate Rankk on scale of 1-10, what would you give it?

Hmm, hard to say. Maybe a 8 or 9. Why not 10? You may ask. Well, I guess it's just missing the community of players. The IRC and the forum are mostly rather quiet. On IRC rarely a noob pops in and asks for a hint. It's usually just me, deo and quangntenemy who sometimes exchange a few words.

On the forum it's just Sphinx posting about a new challenge and a few replies with bugs or suggestions. I suppose the site is new and not well known, so I guess the rate will go up once the community gets more active.

What is your favorite food?

My parents taught me to eat everything :) And now since I'm also a student I truly eat anything that is on a plate. As for favorite food, any home cooked meal is a blessing. Otherwise, I just order a pizza along with some beer ;)

"Death comes to all!" That's your signature line. Care to tell us about it?

I don't really remember where I got that signature, probably from some movie or something. I just loved how it sounded...plus its states a truth, no one escapes death :)

What things would you change or improve if you were to take over Rankk?

Nothing really, the challenges are really nice. For a noob, you can learn a great deal by solving the lower level challenges.

That's the main goal for the site, I think, teaching you stuff. There's really no point in having insane challenges like some other sites that I play.

What is your favorite sport?

I used to do a lots of sports even though people might think I'm a computer geek (which i am :P).

In High School I did a lot of soccer, basketball and volleyball. At University I played volleyball mostly and even took part in some local competitions with my team.

Also, I stayed near the sea so during the summer there was a lot of swimming, beach volley, roller blading, etc.

Sadly, I have moved to the capital and working eight hours a day now, which leaves me with very little time for any sports. Though I bought this fancy American football thingy, so I'm just waiting for the spring to do some tackling with my friends ;)

Interview with valsa

Thanks to valsa who kindly consented to this interview despite his busy schedule in real life.

valsa made the first Geb on 27 Aug 2007. The challenge was uploaded on 13 June 2007.It went through some changes to fine-tune Part 1, and was reloaded on 26 June 2007. Taking that as the starting point, it was cracked some two months later.

If you are curious about the first Geb, so am I. So let's hear it from valsa...

You have been around since the old Pyramid...what was your rank then?

I achieved the rank of Geb**** on 24 July 2003.

You made the first Geb on Rankk...tell us about that.
I've only been lucky that other high rank and smart players didn't accomplish it before me :-) Anyway, after climbing and reaching the apex, I was satisfied.

In your opinions, what makes a good challenge and what makes a crappy one?
Difficult to say. Mostly all the levels that are good are also the easy ones, because otherwise it would become like work and not like a game or something amusing anymore.

Additionally, a level which is easy for you could be difficult for me because maybe at that point in time I could not figure out what it was about.

The only thing I don't like is when it's not clear what to do and you really have lots of different things to try. I mean discovering is also nice, but then again, it must be a game.

Let me take the opportunity to once again say thanks to you for the nice site and for the challenges.

At what point do you say "Enough is enough. I'm not going to touch that challenge."?

I rarely say this because I do want to have a look at it again. Like some of the programming challenges which I haven't solved. I can imagine they are doable but in real life, I'm really busy and have no time to code. The consequence is that there are quite many challenges I haven't looked at for a long time.

Sometimes, I got through Part 1 (or 2) but got stuck in the next part and had no idea how to go on further or what the missing step is, despite trying a lot of times. Usually, I'll wait a couple of weeks before trying these challenges again.

What is your favourite OS?

I do not have a preferred one, and unfortunately there is no perfect OS actually. Depending on what I've to do, I use Microsoft OS'es (Win XP and sometimes Win 98), Linux (Suse and sometimes Red hat) or Solaris.

You know the Geb secret. Do you care to protect it?

I think that Sphinx, Bio and others spent a lot of time in giving people the opportunity to play these challenges, so I see no reason why I should damage the spirit of the Pyramid. I don't see any reason to share this secret.

Where do you see Rankk five years down the road? Would it become a popular challenge site or would it fade away slowly?

 I hope it will not disappear or fade way. Now some clever people who used to play on other popular challenge sites are arriving and are climbing the Pyramid.

And most of the high rank old pyramid members are returning, so it would be nice to see the site still up and running in 5 years!

Do you have a pet? Tell us more about it.

Yes, a bird. When there were two they made a lot of noise, especially when I was watching TV. Now only one is left and he's very quiet. But to be honest, I do not dedicate much time to him.

Interview with quangntenemy

First of all, we would like to thank quangntenemy for taking the time to participate in this interview.

If you're a Rankk member, quangntenemy needs no introduction. He's the top rankked member, with 153 challenges solved at the time of this interview. Not only has he contributed challenges, he has also been helping with providing feedback and fixing bugs.

Speaking for myself, I'm always curious about the person behind the username, and so this interview was conceived. quangntenemy gave very frank and interesting answers to our questions. I enjoyed reading his responses and I'm sure you too will be delighted to hear his story.

How did you discover Rankk?

One nice Friday evening, I felt a little bored. Had a nice chat on #tbs at irc.idlemonkeys.net and ch0wch0w and Sapr0 referred me to the site. It looked interesting and very unique. And so the journey began :D

So you're a Java hacker...could you tell us more about yourself?

I'm 23 years old, working for a bank in Vietnam. Solving computer-based challenges is my passion. I've been solving challenges on various challenge sites since 2003 and I have lots of experience :) Java is my favourite language.

Is there a particular challenge you enjoyed and one that you hated a lot?

Among those I have solved blackjack and python 103 were the most interesting. And of course I hate the challenges I haven't solved :P

How did it begin for you? What was your first challenge site?

Well it all began in 2003 when someone gave me the link to an academy challenge site. It was called StarFleet Academy I think. There were a total of 10 levels and I solved them all in just one night.

As I really enjoyed the challenges, I continued searching for challenge sites and finally found hackergames.net. All the good challenge sites are listed there. I fought my way through various challenge sites, notably arcanum, slyfx, ma's reversing, modx, theblacksheep, hackquest, netforce. theblacksheep was the most enjoyable. I even contributed many challenges there.I really can't imagine how I missed good challenge sites like cyberarmy and the old pyramid. But I'm glad now that I'm here on the new one :)

Do you ever give up on a challenge? How much time are you willing to spend on a challenge before you surrender?

Yes, when I have been working on a challenge for a long time without making any progress. But that's only temporarily. I'll come back once I'm in a good mood to start working on it again or when a new brilliant idea pops out of my mind.

I solve challenges mostly for fun, so the more interesting the challenge looks like, the more time I spend on it.

You are rankked #1 at Rankk...what do you think of that? Do you think you'll be bypassed? If so, who's this person likely to be?

To be honest, it's the first time I can reach the first place at a challenge site, so I consider it my own accomplishment. But I am well aware that some day someone better than me might come and take over the place. It could be an old member like valsa or coobb, or maybe a new guy. Whoever that is, he's gonna have a tough battle. I'm not giving it up easily :)

You haven't solved the Geb challenge - the one that will get you to heavens. Do you have a time frame for it?

No plan yet. I'm currently stuck on the second part although I have been trying it for so long. Maybe one nice day the right idea will pop out and you'll see my name written in blue ;)

If you were to set up a challenge site, how would you do it?

An interesting question. As Java is my favourite language the site would probably be a collection of Java-based challenges. Maybe it'd be divided into different sections for different groups: beginners, intermediate and advanced. And of course it would be Java powered :)

What is your favourite food?

Sheep barbecue, of course. Maybe that'll help you in some challenges ;)

The beginning

Cyberarmy's Zebulun (www.cyberarmy.com) must have been the mother of all challenge sites. It was started around the year 2000 by Overlord (a.k.a pengo) and had a following of 50000 members. It enjoyed such a phenomenal success that it even got into the news CyberArmy declares war.

But partly as a result of its huge success, it was beset with "troubles" leading to its subsequent demise. The site later became known as www.cyberarmy.net, headed by a team that didn't include the founder Overlord.

Alas, the new site doesn't quite have the lure and mystery of the original Zebulun.

I was a Lt Kernel and was trying for the Kernel challenge before the fun ended...

The first challenge was a Javascript challenge. You had to guess a number combination. I didn't know what I was in for, so I happily clicked away. One try, two try, three try, four try, five try and without a warning...the blue screen! I was shocked and angry. Was it a virus or what? I rebooted but was haunted by that blue screen experience to return to the challenge...

A few months passed and I found myself playing with my new toy Redhat Linux (Version 5++). I also had more free time to kill so I decided to revisit that devil...

But this time round, I was very careful. I started with reading the source ;) Then it made sense. I passed that challenge in a couple of minutes...

The next one was a bot challenge - eliza. It was obvious that you had to "chat" with her, so I did just that for an hour or two. It was quite frustrating at some point, if you know what I mean. But I finally got an idea of what the objective was, and began changing my approach. I remember I solved it after some 3 hours and I was really elated. It was totally worth it, despite the "agony" of talking to the "bitch", as it was called by some of the whinners.

And that was how the journey began for me ;)

Half a year later...

At the point of writing, Rankk's membership just hit 700! When this blog was created, I remember we had about 40 challenges. That number has nearly trebled to 118, with two challenges created by our members, valsa and quangntenemy.

During the last six months, several transitional changes were made. At first, you were able to progress one challenge at a time in a strictly linear fashion i.e. challenge 1 to challenge 2, challenge 3 to challenge 4. That was reformed to make it into a hybrid of linear and scatter structure so you could attempt any challenge on the same level. So if you were on Level 4, you could solve any one of the six available challenges in any order. That was less restrictive than the strictly linear structure but it still had problems.

Around that time, we were appproaching the maximum of 45 challenges. A member, i_need_help, started a thread to enquire about what happens after that. He suggested a second face of the Pyramid. That got us thinking about what to do after we completed all the 45 challenges. But that was all - we didn't have a solution.

And then we hit 45 challenges - a dead end.

So we brainstormed for solutions and came up with a points system. Essentially, we needed to move away from linking the number of challenges to the shape of the Pyramid.

So we overhauled the challenge rendering engine which took us about a week or two. At the end of it, a points system was introduced and the new ranking formula uses points rather than the number of challenges solved.

For sure, we didn't come up with all the ideas for the changes. A good number of members provided very useful feedback and we acted on it. Their suggestions and helpful advice can be read on Rankk's forum.

One of the nicest additions must have been the Private Message. There were a number of requests for it on the forum and we eventually got one out. Hopefully it will encourage greater interaction amongst the members, and not be abused for "trading hints" ;)

We see about 2-3 new players per day now which is quite encouraging. A few of our members have also blogged about Rankk: Everlasting Wanderer, No sleep for you and Delphi Area.

Oh, the "hardest" challenge (9/1) was first solved by valsa on 2007-08-22 22:04:35.

That's all for this update. Hope the next one won't be six months later!

The Rankk journey

Rankk is about solving challenges, discovering and learning new knowledge. It's a journey, a sacred, personal experience.
The site is a reincarnation of The Pyramid, an earlier attempt at assembling a set of challenges for those who enjoy solving problems.
The challenges are based on topics ranging from Mathematics to Logic to Puzzle to Programming to Cryptography to Internet Security. They are designed from easy to difficult to impossibly hard.
The first few are challenging enough for anyone with a decent sense of numbers and logical thinking.
Solving a challenge moves you up the Pyramid. The journey to the top is an arduous yet rewarding one. Only a few are expected to reach the apex and meet the Great Sphinx.
Membership to Rankk is free. Your journey begins NOW!