#Insomniacs random brain blast/Questions about reading the eyes in binary

7 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

jolly ermine
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Evening everyone. I was not sure where to ask this question as i did not really find the answer i was looking for in the documents/discord.

Reddit had a random post in a r/Whatisthis about a birthday card that was a cypher message. It ended up being a cypher based on half byte boxes with 90 degree lines that had to be read from a 9'oclock position to get your half byte. Add them up and you got your happy birthday message. This got my brain randomly thinking about this and brought up a question. If we assume the eyes can be in one of 5 positions (0-4) that would equate to half a byte of info, combining 2 eyes would give you a full byte.

Here is my question/brain worm thought. Have we tried reading them by counting from different starting positions (as well as clockwise/counter clockwise). As an example. An eye facing "right" could be potion 2, but what if we read the eyes very literally. Starting from the 12 o clock position moving clock wise we could get 0100. In this pattern an "up" eye would be 1000, "Down" would be 0010 and "left" would be 0001. This would give us half a byte of data to be combined with the eye next to it (or what ever order we would need to read them in). The biggest issues i had was this would be we could read the eyes 8 different ways, starting from the 4 cardinal directions as well as reading it clockwise/counter clockwise. This would assume the "Center" eye would be 0000. That would make 8 different potential outcomes and i dont have the time to brute force this thought out. My gut is telling me reading the cypher shouldn't be over thought, but then again this is Noita so who knows.

Unfortunately, im just an electrician who does not have any real experience in cyphers but enjoys Noita and has kinda always had this puzzle in the back of my mind. Seeing as people here have been making scripts and have a much deeper understanding of cyphers i wanted to put a bug in someone's ear. Perhaps this has been covered and its just a name i dont know or maybe its something new. im not sure. Im sorry if this is a bit out of place, i really did try to find where to post this.

twin mantle
jolly ermine
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I have glanced over the trigrams. I honestly need to read up more to make sure I'm understanding it. The way I have listed up there always outputs 4 digits thus half a byte. Center-0000 up-1000 right-0100 down-0010 and left 00010. Add two eyes and you have your 8 digits to make your byte.

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The issue i had is that the numbers above only correlate to counting from the top in a clockwise way. You could just as easily start at a 9 o'clock position counter clockwise making it center-0000 up-0100 right-0010 down-0001 left-1000

velvet dagger
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in this scheme, you can only have 1 positive bit per half byte though... which isnt half a byte, its just a weird way to encode things. values like 1101, or 1110, or 1111, would all be impossible to encode, even though they are valid combinations of binary

jolly ermine
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It sure would be odd. I'm just trying to think simply and follow the line of thought. I cant help but wonder if this puzzle is far more simple to read. Not easy mind you, just more simple then some of the dissertations I have seen lol

velvet dagger
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I'm not just saying it would be odd, I'm saying it contradicts the definition of a half byte. You can assign whatever arbitrary values to the directions you want (numbers, letter, colors, sounds, strings of 1s and 0s, etc) but you will never have more than 5 values. So 2 eyes give 5^2=25 possible values, but a byte gives 2^8=256 possible values.

The accepted reading order does basically this, but with 3 eyes, for 125 possible values, and there is a LOT of evidence to support that interpretation.