The Floor Code

If you walk into my department, one of the first things you may notice is that some of the tiles on the floor are a black and there’s no particular pattern to it. These tiles actually encode a message. The curious amongst us are supposed to decode this but despite having spent 3 years in the department, I could never get the time until last Friday. The decoding should be pretty simple if you want to try your skills. The last 6 letters of the first word can be read off this picture. If you are too lazy, just click here for the explanation. (Anyone who has taken an Introduction to Computer Science course should at least try for ONE minute before clicking)

The code says : Computer LAboratory — AD 2001 — ☻. If you look closely, the tiles are in the form of squares and some of them are split in the middle such that the left half is always black and the right one is always white. Take each black-white combo as a 1 and the white-white combo as a 0. It’s a straight forward UTF encoding after that. Foe example, the row closest to the bottom of the pic is WWBWBWWWWWWWWWBW, where W is white an B is black. Taking WW = 0 and BW = 1, the code becomes 01100001 i.e. 97 in decimal and its ASCII equivalent is ‘a’. 

Geek Art!

(Oh! and clicking on the image opens up a high res version.)