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About Comments on a Postcard

The Wow! signal was just the beginning. Quickly classified under the Extreme Secrets Act, we have been receiving and recording alien radio broadcasts since 1977, unbeknownst to all but a small cadre of US government scientists.

After 30 years of frustrated effort aimed at decrypting the messages and extracting some sort of meaning from the obviously intelligent signals, the researchers finally cracked the mathematical code based on fundamental constants and deciphered some of the data. When they realised what they had discovered, it only led to further frustration.

The fraction of the messages that was decoded hinted at far greater content, encoded visually in the form of raster images displayed in rectangles of data. The image data existed as long strings of pixel values. All that needs to be done to view them is to factorise the string length into two prime factors to determine the layout of the rectangle. Unfortunately, the numbers involved are so large that the prime factorisation is beyond the capabilities of today's fastest supercomputers.

The accompanying message data merely provides a commentary on the images, revealing only tantalising glimpses into the alien minds who crafted the signals. Deciding that the textual content of the messages without the images poses a negligible risk to the security of Earth, the US government has now declassified them, and presents them as part of a distributed computing effort to crack what may be the most important information humanity has ever received.