Mastodawn

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ZachWeinersmith/116375447678097912

This was a fun collaboration! See also the crypto challenge at the end of the final strip in the 5-part series.

@tao "the beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers", I think? I'm probably doing it wrong as I expected 1-bit errors but thought I had more. Wrote some python finding closest hamming distances to letters in the cartoon, then added new guesses when the unknown had distance 3, repeat

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unnick

@bazzargh @tao i independently got the exact same text! i checked and i dont see any errors bigger than 1 bit. though if you guess the bit pattern for a letter incorrectly it can look like there are 2 bit errors (one from the guess being wrong and another from the message)

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bazzargh 1d ago

@unnick @tao somebody else shared their solution saying the same, I think if I'd just started running the code with distance at most one it'd have been simpler :D