Atop a building at Adobe's World Headquarters in San Jose, Calif., four orange LED circles shifted every 7.2 seconds, broadcasting a looping, encrypted message that remained unsolved for four years until the company announced Monday that a Knox County math teacher had finally cracked the code.
Jimmy Waters, 31, teaches advanced algebra, geometry and trigonometry at Powell High School. Last summer, Waters devoted a month of his vacation time to solving the puzzle presented by the San Jose Semaphore, a project created by New York-based artist Ben Rubin in 2006.
Adobe planned on rewarding Waters with a one-year subscription to its Creative Cloud software, but at his request, the company is donating 40 one-year subscriptions to Powell High School's computer lab, on top of a 3-D printer "to help the students push the boundaries of creativity even further," according to a company news release.
Waters first learned of the project during an online search after reading Thomas Pynchon's novella "The Crying of Lot 49." The full text of the book was the first encrypted broadcast of the Semaphore.
"I saw that (the current message) had been up since 2012," Waters said, "so it’d been about four years since they put it up, and I kind of figured that anybody that had been working on it probably gave up."
Each of the four circles has four possible positions — with the line through the middle displayed vertically, horizontally or diagonally on either side — for a total of 256 possible configurations.
Waters treated each circle's position as a digit, and each configuration as a number in base-4 (a system where each place value is determined by raising 4 to powers, instead of 10). He assigned values to each circle's position: horizontal was 0, the first diagonal, 1, vertical, 2, and the second diagonal, 3.
More (I'm not spoiling what it was or how he finished working it out):
http://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/local/2017/03/13/powell-teacher-cracks-adobe-encryption-wins-software/99145140/
