[FartyMcFarter]

One way to work around that is to allow authors to include comments in the code that gets hashed.

(I'm not sure if this particular competition did that)

[rusk]

are you talking about padding it out to provoke a collision?

Remember, that at the end of the day, you still have to have actual working code …

[FartyMcFarter]

No - what I mean is that if someone is worried that their code will be derived from their published hash by someone doing a brute-force attack, they can prevent (or make much harder) this brute-force attack by having comments in their source code.

I'm assuming here that the hashed string is the source code rather than the machine code.

[rusk]

Ahhh - a salt