We challenged Australian software engineers to find deeper meaning in the Industrial Internet. We gave GE’s smartest machines Twitter accounts and let them loose online. They tweeted to each other in their natural language, binary code, and we hid a message deep in their conversations. We then announced the first person to uncover the hidden message would be sent to GE’s Minds + Machines conference in San Francisco.

Tweeting in binary lured tech-savvy readers in and we kept them engaged with surprising story lines. Locomotives flirted with wind turbines, light bulbs suffered existential crises and an MRI even questioned a CT scanner’s ability to experience love.

We then offered these software engineers something irresistible. A challenge. An image was broken into indiscernible segments invisible to the human eye and then hidden as layers within 8 images that the machines included in their conversations using visual cryptography via digital Mortimer.

Hundreds of Australia’s brightest minds couldn’t resist. After 3 weeks and lots of head scratching, the code was finally cracked. A young engineer used impressive coding skills to build an algorithm that extracted significant pixels from ARGB ‘bits’, and then used those bytes to compose an original image, winning the trip to GE’s Minds + Machines conference in San Francisco.

The results were very favorable. We engaged hundreds of Australia’s smartest software engineers and pitted their computer coding skills against ours. They toiled away for hundreds of hours trying to crack our code. It was no easy feat, with the winner taking over 3 weeks. This simple campaign has helped change software engineers’ perception of GE. We are no longer just seen as a big industrial company in Australia, but an innovative digital company.