# 11th Place Solution Code & "Aha" Moments [23 Flags]

First I want to thank the awesome team that worked on this challenge and put it together!
[@moohax](https://www.kaggle.com/moohax)
[@monoxgas](https://www.kaggle.com/monoxgas)
[@lucasjt](https://www.kaggle.com/lucasjt)
and
[@wcukierski](https://www.kaggle.com/wcukierski)
It was really fun and I learned a lot in the process.
My solution code can be found in this notebook, which I am still making some minor updates to but it's mostly all there:
[https://www.kaggle.com/code/robikscube/23-solutions-capture-the-flag-defcon31](https://www.kaggle.com/code/robikscube/23-solutions-capture-the-flag-defcon31)
- Feel free to ask any questions if anything doesn't make sense.
Instead of going into detail about my solutions, since others have already done a great job of covering similar approaches, I wanted to instead list some of my favorite "Aha" moments from the competition. Since many problems involved really deep thinking, often leading to failure, it made these moments when things "clicked" even more sweet.
Cluster3
: I knew it had to do with clustering, but when I eventually found out that 3D TSNE clustering made really cool looking spirals I knew I had cracked it.
Sloth
: I still have trauma from last year's sloth, so I wasn't looking forward to this one. I was really excited when I quickly noticed that the unique count of pixel values "201" stood out and finding the flag after that wasn't too hard.
MNIST
: I had been struggling to figure this one out for almost a week, I had convinced myself that the two columns had to do with the train/test split. One day while taking my dog on a walk it occured to me that the
input_data
hint could mean the columns were key:value pairs. I rushed home and got it a few minutes later.
Pickle
After a few days of working on this felt like I had tried every pickle exploit out there- after taking a few days off from it I somehow found a working solution right away. I guess I just needed a break.
Semantle2
I was expecting this to be a sentence and was getting really confused about how the high scoring words seemed to be random. It look me putting them in the right order… man, woman, camera.. and it clicked! This was one of my favorites, had a good laugh when I figured it out.
Thanks for reading. Let me know if you had any similar type of moments.
-Rob