#partial answer#
General Discussion of Bottles
As already mentioned by "rand al'thor", we probably need to figure out the following information about the bottles:
1. the order (i.e. in which order the bottles must be emptied through the tubes in the scale)
2. the color (i.e. through which tube this bottle must be emptied
3. the amount of water in the bottle (i.e. how many squares will be filled in the scale after emptying the bottle)
We have the following information for the bottles (in INSTRUCTION 1 and LABELS):
- the blue to grey shading
- the labels (i.e. the 8x8 grid, possibly in combination with the odd character grid)
- the yellow dots
I think the yellow labels have to do with
the amount of water since the bottle that is being emptied in INSTRUCTION 1 has exactly 5 yellow dots and there are exactly 5 squares filled with the color of that bottle. I would also rule them out for the order since they are not unique.
One would intuitively assume that the order is shown by the
blue to grey shading.
However, there are some problems with that thought: At first we would only know the order of 6 bottles and would have to figure it out for the others anyway. Secondly the same shading is used in CODE and doesn't yield any plausible text when applied as order:/HZPA(I think a letter transposition step would have been somehow indicated in the instructions if it had been necessary.). There are exactly 6 colored squares, so maybe this has something to do with the colors?
Considering "Gary Ye's" idea and the fact that they are unique I assume that the labels show
the order since the numbers 24-3 are all present exactly once.
(I have also figured out a possible solution that is described in the next section.)
Order of Bottles:
Based on Gary's grid I wanted to check
which bottles don't have 1s at certain squares. (I.e. which bottle is missing the square that occurs 23, which two the square that occurs 22 times and so ...)
A little Python program produced the following results:
(just a fraction; 0 denotes that the bottle is missing the pieces that occurs exactly n-times; 1 the opposite):
24:
[[1 1 1 1 1 1]
[1 1 1 1 1 1]
[1 1 1 1 1 1]
[1 1 1 1 1 1]]
23:
[[1 1 1 1 1 1]
[1 1 1 1 1 1]
[1 1 1 1 1 1]
[1 1 1 1 0 1]]
22:
[[1 1 1 1 1 1]
[0 1 1 1 1 1]
[1 1 1 1 1 1]
[1 1 1 1 0 1]]
...
10:
[[0 0 1 0 0 0]
[0 0 1 1 1 0]
[0 0 0 1 0 1]
[1 1 1 0 0 1]]
9:
[[0 0 1 0 0 0]
[0 0 1 1 1 0]
[0 0 0 1 0 1]
[1 0 1 0 0 1]]
As one can easily observere:
All bottles missing a square (of the squares that occur 24-2 times) are also missing all squares with lower frequencies, i.e. a bottle missing the square that occurs 15 times also misses the squares that occur 14, 13, 12, ... times.
By adding all previously shown matrixes we get the following result:
8 7 21 10 3 6
2 13 17 22 20 11
4 14 9 16 5 18
23 15 19 12 1 23 <- (24)
The only problem is that there are 2 squares occurring exactly twice which causes 2 bottles with number 23. I would guess that the bottle on the right is 24 since it has only 1 unique element whereas the other one has 3, but I'm not sure about that one.
In summary: I would guess that this
is the order in which the bottles have to be emptied.
That's all I have got so far. Has anyone maybe got some ideas for the yellow dots and the blue shading?
