The Illustrated Guide picture puzzle
In an interview in a back issue of Mostly Harmless, Douglas mentioned that he had made this pattern of 42 squares into a puzzle that depicted the number '42' in ten different ways. Here are six of the solutions:
- There are 6 rows of 7 spheres, making a grand total of 42.
- One of the globes has a bar code- 4 of the lines have no thick line next to them, 2 of them do. The barcode is 42.
- If a red-tint filter is used so that red, purple, 'dark yellow' and black become black (binary 1) and the rest become white (binary 0) then the lines of the diagram become 0101010, which is 42 in binary.
- Similarly, using a blue-tint filter shows the number '42' in quite big letters.
- Using a yellow-tint filter shows up 'XLII' across the top of the page, which is forty-two in Roman numerals.
- The Earth is the forty-second sphere (this may sound tenuous but this was admitted by Douglas Adams himself…)
Please add the other four if you can find them!