This is topic Unlucky Dragon in forum Discussions About Orson Scott Card at Hatrack River Forum.


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Posted by PanaceaSanans (Member # 13395) on :
 
So there is this (believe me, I had not imagined it to look like this either), which is essentially this, or better this.

And we know it's supposed to mean that, but I'm stuck here... [Roll Eyes]

So... help? Maybe one of you can read the program and tell me how the shift is supposed to work? Because I just don't get it...


quote:
Bean had pasted the image into a graphics program and was studying that line of pixels. […] Soon he had the two lines isolated in a separate file and was studying the information as raw code. Viewed as one-byte or two-byte text code, there was nothing that remotely resembled language. […] And so he kept coming back to ways of reinterpreting the binary code as text. Soon enough he came upon a scheme that seemed promising. Two-byte text code, but shifted right by one position for each character, except when the right shift would make it correspond with two actual bytes in memory, in which case double shift. That way a real character would never show up if someone looked at the file with an ordinary view program. When he used that method on the first line, it came up as text characters only, which was not likely to happen by chance. But the other line came up random¬-seeming garbage. So he left-shifted the other line, and it, too, became nothing but text characters.

 


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