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Interstellar
Week 32
It's the year 2067 and Earth is suffering from a contagious disease that is wiping out crops worldwide, putting the very existance of civillisation in danger
Your daughter is insisting something is trying to communicate with her through various strange anomalies she notices around the house - after a severe dust storm, you notice the following strange pattern on the floor. It seems too 'clean' of a signal to be random - you take a photo, remove any background noise and create the following digitised version of the pattern
Note: you will want to download the image in full resolution (e.g. by right clicking on it and saving or clicking this direct link), rather than e.g. taking a screenshot
Can you figure out the message encoded within?
Hints
Hints will be released at the start of each of the following days - e.g. the start of day 3 is 48 hours after the challenge starts
| Release Day | Hint |
|---|---|
| 2 | If you look at the bars, you might notice there are two variables - both the width and the shade of gray. Only one of these is required to solve the challenge; the other is random. Looking more closely, you realise the shades vary widely and seemingly randomly, yet the bar widths seem to be more structured, hence are likely what is used to encode data |
| 3 | You might also notice each bar is separated by a 10px black bar - you realise this is most likely a separator, to prevent two identical consecutive bars appearing as a single bar |
| 4 | Measuring the bar widths in an image editing program, you notice most of the widths in the range 97-122 (i.e. lowercase ASCII letters) pixels, with a few other less common widths included too - what happens if you create a program to measure the width of each bar (remembering to stop when you see a black bar) and convert each width to the ASCII character that width value represents |
| 5 | You can do this by simply looping through all the columns in row 0 of the image - create a counter that increments when seeing a non-black pixel, then when you encounter a black pixel (or end of the image) and have a non-zero counter value, convert that number to its ASCII character and append it to your result string |