Well, think about it this way... What would you do if some no-name star started sending a radio transmission in the direction of your globular cluster? Suppose it has 1679 bits, which factors into two primes... presuming that your culture has some conception of a two-dimensional spatial grid of stacked square elements, you may attempt to format it into such a grid.
The fact that this particular message has a number of bits with exactly two prime factors makes the job of formatting the grid a bit easier, as there are only two possible arrangements that would result in a "full" grid.
From the looks of it, revamerika acted on a hunch that it might be an improperly formatted image, and wrote a perl script to step through different combinations of width/height until he got an intelligible image. I did leave a clue (in the filename of the challenge image), but based on his approach, it looks like he solved it without the clue's help. Actually, trying to figure out the clue, without knowing anything about the answer, might actually be trickier than
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So does this version:
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I knew if anybody would get this bonus point, you would. :)
See you for brunch?
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The fact that this particular message has a number of bits with exactly two prime factors makes the job of formatting the grid a bit easier, as there are only two possible arrangements that would result in a "full" grid.
From the looks of it, revamerika acted on a hunch that it might be an improperly formatted image, and wrote a perl script to step through different combinations of width/height until he got an intelligible image. I did leave a clue (in the filename of the challenge image), but based on his approach, it looks like he solved it without the clue's help. Actually, trying to figure out the clue, without knowing anything about the answer, might actually be trickier than ( ... )
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