Solution for "It's a Trap!"
The title of this problem was supposed to be a hint towards what numbers to use to solve the problem: "It's 'A-Trap'!". Motorola 68000 processors invoked the illegal opcode handling mechanism when an instruction starting with 1111 or 1010 was recieved. Lacking preemptive multitasking, the designers of the Macintosh operating system used instructions starting with 1010 (or A) for "system calls", dubbed A-Traps.
Translating each of the lines to their corresponding A-Trap numbers gives us:
$A9F2 - $A9AE = $44
$A8F6 - $A8F5 + $A8FC - $A8AE = $4F
$A210 - $A20A + $A241 - $A200 = $47
$A08A - $A05B + $A02D - $A019 = $43
$A04F - $A000 = $4F
$AA4B - $A9F4 = $57
If we translate each of these numbers to their corresponding ASCII letters, we
get DOGCOW
. So it was a "Dogcow" that was eating through our source code.
Answers Graded As Correct
- DOGCOW
- dogcow
- Dogcow
- Dog Cow