By Mackenzie Nichols

In May, representatives at Google posted a cryptic tweet about Firebase employee Alex Meddleton losing his “fish,” the elusive firebass. The fish had wreaked havoc on Firebase’s website and systems and it was imperative that the fish was caught as soon as possible. As a reward, Meddleton said he “might be able to give you an I/O 2017 ticket if you help me find it”. Trent Duffy, a computer science major at the College of Computer and Information Science (CCIS), immediately grabbed his friends and fellow CCIS students Alex Aubuchon, Gabriel Centeno, William Gooley, and Anirudh Kaushik, and the group started working through a series of puzzles to catch Meddleton’s bass.

They quickly realized finding this fish was no easy task. The challenge had three timed stages, with the first beginning in mid-May, and phases 2 and 3 opening on the 23rd and 24th of the month, respectively. Each stage posed increasingly-difficult puzzles, requiring skills like binary conversion and decoding stereographs, as well as translating what all the cryptic messages left behind by the bass meant. One of these cryptic messages in phase 2, took the group hours to decode. They eventually realized it was in semaphore, a flag-based language used to communicate between passing ships. After moving past phase 1, the students met Brandon Lerner (BS, Computer Science and Information Science ’14), a CCIS alumni working at PayPal who found out about the challenge from last year’s conference. Brandon reached out to Trent and the team via Twitter and worked with the students for the second and third phases of the competition.

The competitors needed to trace the trail left behind by the escaped bass. The first website traces the fish’s travels through present day firebase.foo, then swims back in time to a 2008 web representation probassfinders.foo, and finally swims to the earlier 1997 representation of probassfinders.foo. “The puzzles and websites were themed around different eras and the nostalgia of the 90s and 80s, and contained old representations of what the Internet looks like,” Anirudh says. “It was interesting to see how they integrated newer technology with old representations of what the Internet looked like.”

In one puzzle, typos on a website (s’s transposed with e’s) gave the clue that a link hidden in the HTML had to be modified. When changed to replace the “e” with an “s”, the link took them to the next clue instead of a 404 error. Many of the clues, like this one, were hidden in the HTML of the websites found throughout the challenge.

Alex recalls a puzzle which contained a wide image of black and white pixels. According to Alex, the team spent a long time converting the pixels to binary. They then noticed that parts of the image changed when overlaid, and ultimately realized that they were working with a stereograph where certain parts of the image pop out. The team was able to pull out a red lettered message overlaid in the black and white pixels. Solving puzzles like these helped the team move closer to finding the fish and the Google I/O tickets.

Brandon remembers another challenge which had to do with music. Because of a class taken at CCIS, he says he was able to immediately recognize the spectrogram and how to decode it. Knowing this information from the class where he learned about hiding messages in audio files was a huge advantage in the challenge.

The team finished the third phase of the competition within 40 minutes of it being released, and were one of the first get the 100 possible tickets to Google I/O. The tickets are approximately $1000 each, Brandon says, and he has been signing up for the lottery for those tickets for six years without luck. Now, the team of seven along with other winners from around the world that collaborated and connected with them via business and social networks, will be attending the conference and working one-on-one with key developers in the computer science industry.

“For years we [have watched]… these keynote speakers thinking it’d be really cool to go, and now we have this opportunity,” Trent says. “We will be going and we’ll be there in person and actually talking to developers and networking, and we’ll be meeting up with people we worked with from around the world.”

Google I/O is a three-day outdoor festival with keynote speakers, previews of upcoming Google products, and around 120 different hourly workshops to attend. The team will likely split up to cover more ground, and may even blog from the different events. CCIS will pay for their lodging and airfare through the Wenzinger Fund, a fund donated to the college allowing students to attend conferences just like Google I/O. The schedule for Google I/O 2017 has not been released yet, and the team is very excited for the next steps.

“Google is the pinnacle of technology, so the fact that we’re going to be there is a really big privilege,” Gabriel says.

As Northeastern students and graduates, the team members are active in groups such as NU Hacks, have created some of their own apps, and are working as research assistants and web developers. Trent is a cofounder at Wizio, which works to give 360 degree views of apartments to make apartment hunting easier; Anirudh and Gabriel are working with a Boston startup on a data analytics platform to help realtors sell homes; Alex works as a research assistant at the MIT Media Lab; William works as a Husky Ambassador on campus; and Brandon is an Android software engineer at PayPal.

“I think I’m the only one who didn’t start programming until college, but I’ve always been interested in technology,” Gabriel says. “As soon as I got to college I saw how welcoming CCIS was and how great their courses are.”