: This one's simpler than it sounds - Seven in binary is 3 ones, so if there
: are 3 switches, they just need to be all on. If there are 4, however, I
: think you'll run into problems.
I had originally a bank of eight switches in a nice neat row, right near that particular door. I was hoping the set of eight might make people think of binary, 8-bit ASCII and all that... and now that you mention it, the old puzzle was a good deal harder than I remembered. It was '7' in ASCII, which is 00110111, and I guess a lot fewer people would get that.
: The inverted set will probably throw
: everyone off and kill the game. With 12 switches, there are 4096 possible
: combinations - no one who has trouble figuring this out will be that
: patient. Now what you could do is to have a prominent terminal pict that
: shows a bank of switches that are properly set. Still, this isn't all that
: clever, and it has to be solvable by the masses.
You know, that's a good idea - pictures. In the terminal with that reference, I could just include a picture of two banks of switches, one with the proper sequence on and one with the same sequence off. Although in the modified version I'm considering for Eternal X there would only be one bank of switches, so just a single pic of that would work fine.
That way it wouldn't be a hard question of "can you figure out in what way some array of switches means 'seven' - in binary math, 8-bit ASCII, what?", and instead poses and immediately answers that question with a picture and it's just a test of observation. I'll have to figure out a better place to put that message though, since as it stands now the terminal it would appear in would be inaccessible once you're at the bank of switches, and that would just be pure evil.
