Creative Recruiting

This ad appears as of this web posting in Austin (30^th & Guadalupe), in a Boston subway and along Highway 101 in California's Silicon Valley, and is actually an engineering screening test for potential applicants by none other than Google as per the following News story:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,132647,00.html

Here is the actual ad in California in case you want to compare it to the one in downtown Austin:

For those who want to know how the story ends ...

It says: "{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com".  This translates into the ad asking for the value of the first 10-digit prime number that appears in the decimal value of e (an irrational number that is the basis of the natural systems of logarithms), add a “.com” to it and you get:

http://www.7427466391.com/

Which brings up the next problem: “f(1) = 7182818284, f(2) = 8182845904, f(3) = 8747135266, f(4) = 7427466391, f(5) = ???”.  These are actually the first 4 values of 10-digit chunks of e that sum to 49.  The 5^th one is “5966290435”.  You need that to go to www.Linux.org as instructed and enter Bobsyouruncle as the login and the answer to this equation (5966290435) as the password as instructed by http://www.7427466391.com/

That leads to this link: http://www.google.com/labjobs/index.html, show below:

 

I wonder how many applicants there were ? 

Oh, in case you want the first 2 million digits of the number e to get you started, NASA was nice enough to post them back in 1994: