Friday, July 13, 2012

PCS 5.6: Solution

To solve yesterday's puzzle, one needed to discover two different messages hidden in the text. The first could be read by taking the first letter of each sentence, which read "ASCII LAST 8". This is your clue to finding the second hidden message.

Somehow, the "last eight" letters of each sentence need to be converted into the name of a Dodger, using ASCII encoding. If you (correctly) looked up an ASCII table at this point (and followed the clues from the puzzle title, Hint# 3, and Hint #5), you might recall that alphanumeric characters are encoded in binary on 8 bits. 8 letters, 8 bits...

Now all that remains is to distill those letters into binary somehow! Noting the pattern of letters for each (vowels=0, consonants=1), your results should have been thus:

AWAITING = 01001011 = K
ITCANSAY = 01101100 = l
INQUEUES = 01100001 = a
ARTISTRY = 01101110 = n
ETHIOPIA = 01100100 = d
ENFLEECE = 01110010 = r
ACHEIVED = 01100101 = e
AFREEOUT = 01100001 = a
INSPIRED = 01110101 = u
IGHTSEYE = 01111000 = x


Ken Landreaux!

Congratulations to ubragg, BCCSweet, and Golem for correct solutions! Next puzzle, Thursday, July 19, 7:00am.

5 comments:

QuadSevens said...

Y is a vowel!? Dammit! I used a 1 for Y and got "Kmaodreauz". Rearranged you get "Kuroda meaz".

Nice puzzle.

Mr. LA Sports Czar said...

Ten points, ten points, ten points!

Franklin Stubbs said...

@Quad

OUCH, So close! Unfortunately, there is no "Sometimes Y" in binary. All the instances of Y used were vowels, by design.

Neeebs (The Original) said...

This puzzle is the height of geekdom. Well played people.

Franklin Stubbs said...

You ain't seen nothin' yet, brother Neeebs.