⇥ Challenge #4 is here!

As promised, I have a new challenge ready for my readers… I hope you won’t hold the fact that it’s been almost two whole months since the last one against me! My only defense is that I’ve been too busy.

I am changing the rules slightly for this round due to some complaints I received stating that the first three challenges were too “timezone-sensitive,” meaning that those folks who happen to be awake when I am have an inherent advantage in terms of additional time to solve the puzzles compared to those who aren’t. I just hope that this isn’t the beginning of one of those “you’ve got to make it fairer” trends that one of these days are going to cause the Universe to collapse onto itself…

Thus, in the interest of fairness, from now on I will select the winner using this method:

• If one or more correct solutions are received within the first 24 hours of the posting time of the challenge, the winner will be selected at random among those correct solutions.
• If no correct answers are received within the first 24 hours, then the first one to send in a correct solution wins.

Without further ado, here is this month’s challenge:

245 431 356 237 33 29 467 123

This challenge, like the previous two, is completely self-contained. I’ve given you a key, and if you can’t see it… you’re just not looking hard enough! Perhaps it’s time to give this site another look, or use a bit of good humour.

And the rules, as always:

• If one or more correct solutions are received within the first 24 hours of the posting time of the challenge, the winner will be selected at random among those correct solutions.
• If no correct answers are received within the first 24 hours, then the first one to send in a correct solution wins.
• Solutions must be sent to me via e-mail. I am not responsible for e-mail messages that get lost in any way, and the timestamp on my end is the final judge of who gets here “when.” If you win, you agree to allow me to post your name (and URL if you like) here—just so that everyone else knows I’m not making the winners’ names up.
• The riddle does have a solution—but it is, of course, possible that I have made a mistake in calculating it. In that case, I will void the contest and post a correct one.
• The winner will receive a $50 gift certificate that can be spent at the php|architect online store on any product, without any limitation, so long as the entire $50 is spent on a single order (sorry, that’s the way our store works). The coupon will expire after one year from the date of issue.
• The contest closes on August 31, 2008, at which point I will post the correct solution if no-one has sent it to me yet.