Does any of 3301 media hash out to what’s on page 56?

Short answer, no.

TLDR; Longer answer

In programming, there are two key aspects you need to understand. The first is what is a byte. A byte is 8-bits of data so if you have 00000010, that would be a represented by a byte value of 2. And all data on a computer will be broken down into bytes.

The second concept is a hashing algorithm. What is a hashing algorithm? A hashing algorithm is a one way algorithm that returns a “fingerprint” for the data passed. Anything can be hashed that can be represented as a byte array as that is what most of the hash functions take. So you would take any piece of data, convert it to it’s byte values, then pass it to the function. Then the algorithm will return the hash bytes, which can then be converted to a hexadecimal string for easier reading. So basically, anything digital can be hashed. Numbers, strings, content, etc. Anything.

Can you bring me around to how this applies to 3301? Yes, I converted all of the 3301 media in the scream314 repo (https://github.com/scream314/cicada3301/) and converted it to the byte arrays, then wrote the bytes out to a file in their string format. Then I ran them through the following hashing algorithm and here are the results. All the hashing algorithms are their 512-bit variety.