It took him three days to find the discount code for ‘CuriousU’. In this way, Thomas Nijboer from Nijmegen earned himself free access to the summer school on the campus of the University of Twente, in August.
CuriousU is a vibrant combination of courses, lectures and a festival with music and theatre, from 13 to 22 August on the UT campus. It will be the third edition: in 2016, 260 young people from 40 countries came to Twente for this.
three days computing
The CuriousU organisation challenged potential participants to win free access to the festival: by acting like a serious hackers, they could try finding the password that protects the discount code. Thomas Nijboer, an Artifical Intelligence student from Nijmegen, was the first to hack the code. He wouldn’t call himself a seasoned hacker: “First of all, it took me a full evening to get acquainted with the ‘hashcat’ programme, before I could attempt hacking the code.” There are several ways of finding passwords. One of them is the ‘brute force’ method, which essentially tries all possible combinations until the right one is found. ‘Hashcat’ does this in a smarter way, Thomas explains: “But still, it would take three or four months computing time to find the right combination. There were some hints on the CuriousU website, and I had a bit of luck, so I found it in three days instead.”
serious gaming
Thomas already planned to come to CuriousU anyway. In fact, he got it as a present from his girl friend. “I’m particularly interested in the Serious Gaming sessions. I like to play board games, and I’m curious about the serious applications of gaming. Artificial Intelligence is, of course, important in serious gaming, so it also matches my study interests.”
Check the CuriousU website for more information on the 2017 edition.
