Puzzle Description:

Answer in first spoiler.

#1: Glenn Crider (playamonkey) on Sep 14, 2013 [SPOILER]

Spells out 'hello' assuming A=1,B=2...Z=26

Cool! It looks a bit like a person kneeling, with a picture on the wall behind his head.

I don't get it. Your code yields 8 - 5 - 12 - 12 - 15. How does that translate to this configuration of pixels? Reading from top to bottom, I get 8 - 5 - 12 - 12 - 7. To get 15 for the last row, R5C2 should be black.

Yeah. Joel is right. The current code spells "hellg". Really cool idea for a puzzle though!

I don't understand the code at all. How do you get 8, in the first place. If you could explain that, I might figure the rest. I understand that H is the 8th letter. I don't understand how 8 is in the puzzle.

It is binary.
00001=1
00010=2
00011=3
00100=4
etc.
Or, think of the far right column as two to the zero power, the next column is two to the first power, then two to the second power etc.

The last row of this puzzles is 2^3 + 2^2 + 2^1 = 4+2+1 =7 (corresponding to G)

In base 10, the places correspond to 1s, 10s, 100s, 1000s, etc.

In binary, base 2, the columns correspond to 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.

To sum up, what Brian said, but in less math-y terms. :)
Since 16 is 10000, then 15 is 01111. (Like 9999 being one less than 10000)

New version published by playamonkey.

Yup, stupid me, I left out a 1. The last row was changed to 01111.

um huh

"2^3 + 2^2 + 2^1 = 4+2+1 =7 (corresponding to G)"
Is it sure???? In Europe, 2^3=8, 2^2=4, 2^1=2, so I see it to 8+4+2=14 ...
Yes, I know, You're living in a country, where FOOT-BALL is played by throwing an egg! :))))

Brian had an off-by-one error in his exponents. He means

2^2 + 2^1 + 2^0 = 4+2+1 = 7

And American footballs are not egg-shaped. They are closer to a prolate spheroid (Rugby and Canadian Footballs are prolate spheriods) but are more pointed, with a cross section more like a lens or a vesica piscis, which is the intersection of two circles of equal radius drawn such that the center of one is on the perimeter of the other.

Oblate spheroid is more fun to say, though I don't know how accurate the term may be.

An egg with pointy ends just seems painful for the mama bird.

Thanks for the edit Jan.

If you rotate a parabola on an axis perpendicular to the axis of symmetry you get somthing similar to an American football. I think if you rotate it about the symmetry axis it is called a paraboloid (what people commonly refer to as parabolic as in "parabolic mirror"). This might be called a paraboloid too.

Kristen - it's approximately the opposite of an oblate spheroid. The oblate spheroid has the poles mashed. The football's poles are pulled outward.

Let's see, in ASCII this would be ^H^E^L^L^O, or <backspace>(something)<form feed><form feed>(something).

This is info I don't need in my brain anymore.

Goto next topic

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