Friday, October 20, 2017

Say hello to my lidl friend

Well, it has happened. Now that I have become 100% indoctrinated into all things consumerist, I have now relegated my blog to grocery stores; namely Lidl (pronounced lee-dill ... which should appease the Mexicans and Germans amongst us). Now, for some of my readers, you would be asking me why I have lowered my quality blog just so I can talk about Lidl? Perhaps it's because of the huge cheque (take note, Americans :)) Lidl is paying me ... or perhaps it's because I can finally buy high-quality goods at prices which make the Krogers of this world cry. Hey, I'm all for it. Cheap? Check. Great quality? Check. European-quality ingredients? Chu-check. 

But that's not the point of this blog entry. Behold my current fixation:



Maybe it's because I've seen a few IQ tests in my time ... but the bag looks disturbingly like one to me. Doesn't it? Like one of those spatial puzzles. I initially tried to see if there was a predetermined rotational pattern by reading the icons in various orders like top-down, left-right etc. But that didn't seem to gibe. The best pattern I could determine was that  the top row would repeat on the third row ... but then the fourth row threw things out (note: black semi-circle up is what I define as up).
  • down, up-left, left
  • down-left, right, up
  • down, up-left, left
  • down

It's that last grape-fruit which puts a wrench in the works - it should have been down-left but it's not. Having, seemingly exhausted getting any rotational/reading pattern to line up, I took a step back. It could possibly be some kind of numbering pattern. Namely, each orientation could be a number. Considering there were 10 grape-fruits and 8 possible rotational positions (for what has been shown), the answer was obviously ten 8-bit numbers. The next was to determine the starting position. It made sense that the numbers would follow a classical clock-wise rotation so I devised the following:
  • up:  00000001 or 1
  • up-right: 00000010 or 2
  • right: 00000100 or 4
  • down-right: 00001000 or 8
  • down: 00010000 or 16
  • down-left: 00100000 or 32
  • left: 01000000 or 64
  • up-left: 10000000 or 128
So,  the code, as it stands, (read from left-right to top-down) would be:
  • down, up-left, left, down-left, right, up, down, up-left, left, down

    or

  • 16, 128, 64, 32, 4, 1, 16, 128, 64, 16
... and that's where I currently stand. The 10 characters don't seem to signify words, since we don't have the granularity needed to represent 26-characters. Nor could it be a phone number since we would need 10 pattern variations for that. I'm thinking it may be an accumulation ... which in that case would mean that the answer is 469. A little under-whelming a conclusion, yes. Maybe I'm over-thinking this but it seems like there's more to this than merely a desire to print grapefruits, yes? Or maybe I have a little too much time on my hands for this to be healthy - please let me know. I would like to get to the bottom of this.