SOLUTION.md 2.3 KB
Analysis
We begin by reading the text word by word, trying to recognize as many hints as possible.
XXXVI levers
Converted to arabic, this is 36. Furthermore, levers have only two positions (up and down), so it is safe to assume that the answer will be a combination of 1s and 0s.
Twelve candles in restless motion
The 12 candles are visualized in the image. In the original challenge the candles would change color every time you open the level, thus being in restless motion.
Blood, grass and the ocean
Note how the words are colored in red, green and blue - RGB! This hint tells us that we will have to keep in mind the colors of those candles.
Dark is zero. Light is one.
This line can be interpreted in too many ways without more context. We will get back to it later.
The first is up, the second down.
The first what? Following the context, it means that the first candle is up, and the second down. This suggests that we may have to go column by column whenever we are trying to build our answer.
Start where the sun disappears
The sun disappears in the west!
Putting it all together
The most important part of this challenge is connecting the candles with the already known format of the answer. We know that there are 12 candles, but the answer is supposed to be 36 bits long, or 3 times the candles. There are two ways to fill that information - either candles will repeat, or each candle contains 3 bits of information. Indeed, the latter is possible! Each candle is either a primary or secondary color, which means that we can express each candle color using only the primary colors red, green and blue. That is 3 bits of information per 12 candles, which makes 36! If we go back to the 3rd line of the riddle, it now makes sense:
Dark is zero. Light is one.
If we have black or gray - we put 0, otherwise - we put 1.
We create a map of the candle colors:
[110]-[100]-[011]-[101]-[110]-[010]
| |
[000]-[000]-[101]-[100]-[000]-[111]
Concatenating the colors, column by column, left to right, we get:
110000100000011101101100110000010111
And this is the answer to this final level of the Avast Challenge.