What is reverse Engineering?
Reverse engineering, also called back engineering, is the processes of extracting knowledge or design information from a product and reproducing it or reproducing anything based on the extracted information.
Some Links: Wikipedia (link) – Why is it important? (Link/Quora) – Is it legal? (link) – Another article (link)
The Challenge
As a beginner exercise, here’s a simple game theory game.
Version 3: Download now (Github)
Requirement: Requires JRE or JDK installed, any OS.
What you have to do is to try playing for a while (sorry I haven’t given a reset button – each time the game terminates, you will have to close and reopen it). When the game terminates, the buttons grey out.
Take this as a fun project – and tell me if you made some progress!
You can gather some hints from here as well. The source is also available there, but I would recommend you to take this as a challenge and try solve the “puzzle” yourself!
More about reverse engineering
Reverse engineering in action: see scientists reverse engineering one of the early systems
Just like physical chips, software can be reverse engineered to! We would use the software, try all possible inputs, see how the software/a certain part of software works, and try replicate it.
Note: If you want version 2, which has some tiny errors and no reset button, you can download the zipped JAR file here (Dropbox).
The source code is freely available under GPL in Github.
Lecture Diaries 