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What is CHECKSUM in Geocaching?


Idiosensory

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There is a cache I am working on that says to "calculate the checksum of a year"--1984 for example. Does this just mean add all four numbers together? Coming from a technology background, I would not use checksum to describe the act of summing all of the numbers. The difficulty is 2--what is checksum then?

 

Thanks,

-i

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Yes, it's adding all 4 numbers together.

 

It usually means some sort of algebraic calculation to check your coordinates in a puzzle. Sometimes it's a sum of all the digits; sometimes it's something like, "You should have 3 2's in the coordinates." It's not used in the normal programming sense. :)

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There is a cache I am working on that says to "calculate the checksum of a year"--1984 for example. Does this just mean add all four numbers together? Coming from a technology background, I would not use checksum to describe the act of summing all of the numbers. The difficulty is 2--what is checksum then?

 

Thanks,

-i

 

I believe the cache owner is asking you to add the digits of the year together. The better question would have been "The sum of the digits of the year".

 

So 1984 would be 22. Mind you, for most puzzle cache questions, the answer should be a single digit number as it will be part of the missing digits for the GZ coordinates. Does a 2 digit number make sense for your solution?

 

Checksum is sometimes used as a check of the sum of all of the numbers required for the solution of the puzzle as an alternative to a Geocheck link.

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There is a cache I am working on that says to "calculate the checksum of a year"--1984 for example. Does this just mean add all four numbers together?

 

Here in the UK it means add all the numbers you get...

 

However, it doesn't mean you have the correct numbers, in the correct order!

 

eg. You get 1984 as your answer, the check sum is 22

If you read your found numbers wrong and get 1849, it will still give you 22 as your checksum! :o

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