April 2017 - Solution

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April 2017 Challenge


Many of you used factoring programs. Some of the solvers didn't even notice that two has a common factor.
We meant you to solve it using the GCD algorithm on all pairs, thereby discovering a common factor, and then reading the factors as ASCII strings:

The factorization of the three numbers is as follows:

n1 = 1013209076077649209484940814946799145391416348710836269949 *
27409442019512990822647850170314237623576356233289777
   = ')Reverse the characters}' * 'IBM Quantum computer 1'

n2 = 1013209076077649209484940814946799145391416348710836269949 *
97015113058097176690586226108597571924676074369837
   = ')Reverse the characters}' * 'Bad printable primes-'

The common factor is a hint: reversing the string we get a factor of the third number
n3 = 3076048694171659720381726519691214280505664619002804392489 *
459204260897478908239259636478617449777306089311
   = '}sretcarahc eht esreveR)' * 'PonderThis Apr 2017_'

Armin Krauß was the first to send us the ASCII strings and got a second '**' for that.