Re: Factor

I’ve enjoyed being a subscriber to The ListServe, a mailing list where each day one subscriber wins a lottery to write to the entire list of over 24,000 subscribers. There has been a lot of life advice, stories, recipes, music and book recommendations, and even puzzles posted to the list. You can see some of the past posts on The ListServe Blog.

In today’s post, someone includes a quick puzzle, which (semi-spoiler alert!) I wanted to show how to solve using Factor:

One preachy puzzle (easy to solve with the aid of the Internet, and therein lies the irony): 01001000 01110101 01101101 01100001 01101110 01110011 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01101110 00100000 01100100 01100001 01110100 01100001

At first glance, it looks like binary numbers separated by spaces in a sequence with some meaning, probably some kind of sentence, probably in English, and probably ASCII encoded.

Let’s try and solve it with that in mind:

"""
01001000 01110101 01101101 01100001 01101110 01110011
00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01101101
01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000
01100001 01101110 00100000 01100100 01100001 01110100
01100001
"""
[ blank? ] split-when harvest [ bin> ] "" map-as .

It’s a neat message, but I won’t spoil the answer for you.