Turing birthday in binary General forum

8 replies. Last post: 2019-07-16

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Turing birthday in binary
  • lorentz at 2019-07-15

    Looking at England's new £50 note we're told that the ticker tape depicts Alan Turing's birth date (23 June 1912) in binary code. I am unable to figure out what kind of encoding they used. Can somebody help me? (I suppose it's somewhat appropriate to use a code that does not seem easy to break.  :) )

    https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48962557

  • Wolfpack at 2019-07-15

    https://twitter.com/danbarker/status/1150754128362188800

  • urmaul at 2019-07-15

    (The binary code, hardly readable in the low resolution image that I see when I follow the link, is 1010111111110010110011000.)

    I may have found something: https://pastebin.com/bXEsLgeN

  • urmaul at 2019-07-15

    I should have refreshed before posting. Deleting one's posts is not possible, is it?

  • Wolfpack at 2019-07-15

    I would guess if alan turing used a date on a 5 bit (=word) computer not having much memory to use:-

    maybe one word each for “day of month” and “month” and two words for “year” (zero been = year 1900) which covers a 1000 years

    so 20 bits = 10111 00110 00000 00110

  • Wolfpack at 2019-07-15

    it's catching, need an edit/delete

    so 20 bits = 10111 00110 00000 01100             (23) (6) (0)*32+(12)

  • lorentz at 2019-07-15

    Thanks for the link, Burglar. I didn't occur to me that the “code” was simply a single integer.

    urmaul, it is indeed impossible to delete a post. It used to be a perk of being a member, but no more.

  • Wolfpack at 2019-07-16

    On the £50 note I would make the Turing machine bits into a hologram ( maybe up/down ) of birth and death dates converted to DDMMYYYY format as a decimal and then to binary

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