The Kember Identity
Posted May 2nd, 2009 by Conor in in Fedora,Languages,PHPThis morning on twitter I came across something called The Kember Identity. Elliott Kember seems to have thought of something that simply hasn’t occured to the rest of the world. That thing has been aptly named “The Kember Identity”. It’s homepage is located here.
Anyway the Kember Identity is an md5 hash. Each md5 hash contains 32 characters so the KID is the theoretical hash that when it is encrypted it returns itself. At the moment this is a theory as it has not been proven. So Elliott has started a competition to see if anyone can figure out if the KID actually exists and if so what it is.
I have chosen to enter this competition with a PHP script that I wrote just a few minutes ago. It’s fairly simple and I have added a html table in there to clean it up a bit. Instead of computing endlessly this script displays all failed equations as it goes. When it finds the KID it will stop and show it in bright green. I ran the script for a few minutes and got to 200,000 hashes with no luck. Also FireFox froze a few times while running it. The best thing to do is just leave it to do it’s job and don’t do anything else while it is working!
You can view it here: http://files.macaoidh.name/php/the-kember-identity/md5.php
<?php
function encript($str){ return md5($str); }
function generateSum(){ return md5(mt_rand()); }
function loKIDe(){
$s=generateSum();
$md5=encript($s);
echo '<tr><td>'.$s.'</td><td>'.$md5.'</td>';
if($s!=$md5) return false;
else{
echo '<tr style="color:green"><td>'.$s.'</td><td>'.$md5.'</td></tr>';
return true;
}
}
echo '
<h1>Finding the Kember Identity...</h1>
<table>
<tr>
<th>32 Digit Number</th>
<th>Md5 Of Num</th>
<th>Count</th>
</tr>
';
$num='';
while(loKIDe()==false){
$num++;
echo '<td>'.$num.'</td></tr>';
}
echo '</table><br/><br/> If you are seeing this then the line above is equal';
?>
This script should, in theory, find the KID. But it is really a matter of time. I am going to keep it running all night tonight and see if I have any luck. Kae is thinking of writing a JavaScript version that will spread the load between multiple computers thus reducing calculation time. So the race is on! I hope that I am the first to find this magical, mysterious number!
