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5
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ I've never attempted making this kind of puzzle before and I'm not sure the types of reactions I'm gonna get... so please be nice and leave constructive criticism! $\endgroup$ Aug 17, 2020 at 22:30
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ Nice enigmatic puzzle. $\endgroup$ Aug 18, 2020 at 15:33
  • $\begingroup$ Why is this blank? $\endgroup$
    – WarpPrime
    Aug 18, 2020 at 16:03
  • 8
    $\begingroup$ @fasterthanlight -- That's the puzzle! $\endgroup$ Aug 18, 2020 at 16:20
  • $\begingroup$ This looks like it should be a Meta post at first sight... $\endgroup$
    – mathlander
    Dec 21, 2022 at 2:15

1 Answer 1

35
$\begingroup$

The question body contains a sequence of

\u200b and \u200c characters repeated five times.

Mapping them to 1 and 0 respectively, we get


[0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1],
[0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1],
[0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1],
[0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1],
[0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1],
[0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1]]

Treating these as ASCII bits, this becomes the string:
Ah! You've figured me out!

$\endgroup$
7
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Well... 8 minutes! $\endgroup$ Aug 17, 2020 at 22:39
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @Voldemort'sWrath Obviously these are outputs of some (probably Python) program. This is also what I would have done... so I'd say 8 minutes is a reasonable time. Nice puzzle! $\endgroup$
    – WhatsUp
    Aug 18, 2020 at 2:37
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Long time no see ... $\endgroup$ Aug 18, 2020 at 11:23
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ How did you get the first part? $\endgroup$ Aug 18, 2020 at 11:44
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ @SagarChand - selecting the place where the post text would have been gave me a bunch of invisible - but selected - text. That already meant that there's some invisible character trickery going on. Which was my first idea anyway. Next step was right-click and "Inspect" the HTML code in the built in developer tools. Ahh! HTML entities! There we go.... $\endgroup$
    – Vilx-
    Aug 19, 2020 at 10:04

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