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Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow. The 42 Puzzle is a game devised by Douglas Adams in 1994 for his popular The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. In the books, 42 is known as The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything that Deep Thought, a sophisticated computer constructed by pandimensional beings, returns (after seven-and-a-half million years of calculating). Referencing this, he created a puzzle whose question was unknown, but whose answer is already known to be 42. Image File history File links This is the 42 puzzle, taken from http://www. ...
Image File history File links This is the 42 puzzle, taken from http://www. ...
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1979, ISBN 0330258648) is the title of the first of five books in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy comedy science fiction series by Douglas Adams. ...
Douglas Noël Adams in an undated publicity photograph by Jill Furmanovsky. ...
The cover of the first novel in the Hitchhikers series, from a late 1990s printing. ...
42 is the natural number following 41 and followed by 43. ...
The Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything is a concept taken from Douglas Adams science fiction series The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. ...
There are many minor characters in the various versions of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. ...
The puzzle is an illustration consisting of 42 multi-coloured balls, in 7 columns and 6 rows. According to Douglas Adams (in an interview reprinted at Douglas Adams Continuum), "Everybody was looking for hidden meanings and puzzles and significances in what I had written (like 'is it significant that 6 * 9 is 42 in base 13?'. As if.) So I thought that just for a change I would actually construct a puzzle and see how many people solved. Of course, nobody paid it any attention. I think that's terribly significant."
The puzzle first appeared in The Illustrated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was later incorporated into the covers of all five reprinted "Hitchhiker's" novels. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1979, ISBN 0330258648) is the title of the first of five books in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy comedy science fiction series by Douglas Adams. ...
Solutions to the Puzzle
In another interview, the author mentioned that there were 10 solutions to the problem, some of which are: - There are 6 rows which, multiplied by 7 columns, gives a total of 42 spheres.
- The white globe on the left, with a bar code on it, is 42 using Interleaved 2 of 5 encoding.
- All 6 lines of the diagram can be read as "0101010", which is 42 in binary code, if one considers the red hued spheres (red, purple, dark yellow, and black) as a '1' and those without (white, blue, green, light yellow) as a '0'.
- If the reader looks at the spheres with a blue tint (blue, green, purple, and black), they spell '42' (in a manner similar to a test for colorblindness).
- The Earth-coloured sphere is in the bottom right corner, the 42nd position on the grid.
- The spheres with a yellow tint (yellow, dark yellow, green and black) spell out "XLII", 42 in Roman numerals, across the top three rows.
- The Earth-coloured sphere appears to be centered on Latitude 0° and Longitude -42°
- The light is shinning on the shperes at a 42 degree angle.
([http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp? searchtype=address&formtype=latlong&latlongtype=decimal&latitude=0&longitude=-42 Mapquest]) Wikipedia encoded in Code 128_B A barcode (also bar code) is a machine-readable representation of information in a visual format on a surface. ...
Interleaved 2 of 5 is a continuous two-width barcode symbology encoding digits. ...
The term binary code can mean several different things: There are a variety of different methods of coding numbers or symbols into strings of bits, including fixed-length binary numbers, prefix codes such as Huffman codes, and other coding techniques including arithmetic coding. ...
Red is a color at the lowest frequencies of light discernible by the human eye. ...
For the city in Vietnam, see Huế A hue refers to the gradation of color within the optical spectrum, or visible spectrum, of light. ...
For other uses, see Blue (disambiguation) Blue is one of the three primary additive colors; blue light has the shortest wavelength range (about 420–490 nanometers) of the three additive primary colors. ...
Since the NTSC color television standard is susceptible to color errors, there is a tint control on NTSC television sets, which allows the image hue to be corrected. ...
Color blindness in humans is the inability to perceive differences between some or all colors that other people can distinguish. ...
Yellow is a color with a wavelength 565-590 nanometers. ...
The system of Roman numerals is a numeral system originating in ancient Rome, and was adapted from Etruscan numerals. ...
Latitude, sometimes denoted by the Greek letter φ, gives the location of a place on Earth north or south of the Equator. ...
Map of Earth showing lines of longitude, which appear curved and vertical in this projection, but are actually halves of great circles Longitude, sometimes denoted by the Greek letter λ, describes the location of a place on Earth east or west of a north-south line called the Prime Meridian. ...
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