It is our 21st wedding anniversary, and my wife just gave me a puzzle in the form of a
beaded bracelet, telling me that there was a message but not what it was.

The beads run like this, starting from the decorative knot that lets you
adjust the size, and using an O for the round beads and X for the cylinders:

OOOXOOXXXOOOXOXOXXXXXOOX

Now, there are two easy possibilities off the top of my head. It might be a
computer code in binary. There are 24 beads total, so they could be three
8-bit characters --

00010011 10001010 11111001

or that sequence backwards, with all the bits flipped, or both. But any way you do that,
you get leading 1s, which mean it can't be ASCII. It doesn't follow the right bit pattern to
be a character in UTF-8, and none of 0x138AF9, 0x9F51C8, 0xEC7506, nor 0x60AE37 are
defined Unicode characters, so also can't be a character in UTF-32. Putting binary aside,
then, I go back to my actual first guess and try Morse code, substituting dots for the
round beads and dashes for the cylindrical ones.

...-..---...-.-.-----..-

That still needs to be separated out, first into individual letters and then into words, but
that's pretty straightforward:

.. / .-.. --- ...- . / -.-- --- ..-

I was pretty fortunate that the most straightforward decoding was also the right one.

I'm also pretty fortunate to have a wife who knows I'd enjoy this so much, aren't I?

Posted at 7:30:19 pm (2460158.47939) [/personal/] #