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I was more impressed by these images intended for aliens' consumption: http://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/img/q01.gif http://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/img/q01

• bitwize 15y ago
  Yeah, those are Blasto, Adventure, and Miner 2049er on a TI-99/4A that overheated and had a graphical glitch.
• ajasmin 15y ago
  Those low res glyphs look like they come from the Space Invaders game.
• lloeki 15y ago
  spoiler alert, if you want to decode them q01.gif counts in dots and associates it with binary X and O. The most often repeated symbol (like a double-dashed integral) looks like a separator, or more probably an equal sign. It follows that then rightmost side of each equation is numbers too, in decimal form since 10 is one followed by zero. Underside are a list of prime numbers in base 10. The last line is a Mersenne prime, precisely 2^3021377-1, which I suppose was among the largest primes proven at that time. It also conveniently defines minus symbol and exponent notation by offset. The XO on top define page number in binary, and also define page orientation. The middle symbol certainly defines some chapter. The symbols are certainly so convoluted to resist bit rot and/or tampering, offering some form of redundancy, and making them unambiguous upon rotation.