Full of Stars [AI/ML] [HINTS] [HTB]

The goal is to identify the clusters correctly and decipher a message.

How did I solve it;

  • Data Visualization:

    • Used Plotly for a 3D scatter plot to visualize the known and unknown stars.
    • Observations:
      • Known members (red dots) are not centroids.
      • Clusters have irregular shapes, making simple quantization unsuitable.
  • Data Normalization:

    • Normalized X, Y, and Z coordinates to ensure equal scaling across all axes.
  • Clustering Approach:

    • Employed a KDTree for efficient nearest neighbor search.
    • Implemented an iterative search to assign cluster labels, gradually expanding the search distance to cover more points in each iteration.
  • Result:

    • Successfully clustered the stars.
    • Generated a JPG file with the flag.