Calculate the hamming distance between messages from stdin and a given seed message. Used for a contest on Reddit.

md5golf.py

import md5
base_message = "I want old gamecube games."
# get the hex digest as an integer
base_md5 = int(md5.md5(base_message).hexdigest(), 16)

starter_seed = "I would like to win your contest. Here's a word to shorten my md5 hamming distance: "

mindist = 128
for word in open("/usr/share/dict/words").readlines():
    word = word.strip()
    inp = starter_seed + word
    # get the hex digest as an integer
    inp_md5_hex = md5.md5(inp).hexdigest()
    inp_md5 = int(inp_md5_hex, 16)
    # calculate the xor of the binary representations
    inp_xor = inp_md5 ^ base_md5
    # sum up the hamming distance between the digests
    hamming = sum([1 for x in bin(inp_xor) if x == '1'])
    if hamming < mindist:
        print starter_seed + word
        print hamming
        mindist = hamming

md5hamming.py

import sys

base_message = "I want old gamecube games."
# get the hex digest as an integer
base_md5 = int(md5.md5(base_message).hexdigest(), 16)

while 1:
    # read input and strip it
    inp = sys.stdin.read().strip()
    # get the hex digest as an integer
    inp_md5_hex = md5.md5(inp).hexdigest()
    inp_md5 = int(inp_md5_hex, 16)
    # calculate the xor of the binary representations
    inp_xor = inp_md5 ^ base_md5
    # sum up the hamming distance between the digests
    hamming = sum([1 for x in bin(inp_xor) if x == '1'])
    print inp_md5_hex
    print hamming