San Jose semaphore atop Adobe building solved: It is a novel

[Dave Monroe]

San Jose semaphore atop Adobe building solved: It is a novel
By Sal Pizarro
Mercury News
San Jose Mercury News
Article Launched:08/15/2007 01:34:39 AM PDT

Two guys walk into a bar in San Jose . . .

That's not the start of a joke but an act that led to the men
answering a riddle that has been puzzling Silicon Valley for the past
year.

The two guys in question, Bob Mayo and Mark Snesrud, solved the San
Jose semaphore - a communication mode that uses moving flags or lights
to send messages. That's the public art mystery message being flashed
in a series of four changing symbols from atop the Adobe tower on
Almaden Boulevard.

The four glowing amber disks started beaming the code last August as
part of the ZeroOne digital art festival. When it was launched, we
were told it was some sort of code and that the pattern could be
figured out. Tuesday, the answer was revealed: It's the entire text -
about 800 paragraphs - of Thomas Pynchon's 1966 novel "The Crying of
Lot 49."

It took the semaphore a few months to cycle through every word of the
book, but Mayo and Snesrud needed only three weeks - five hours a day
- to crack it. (Organizers decided not to reveal the code or the names
of the winners for a year, which means Mayo and Snesrud are good at
keeping secrets as well as solving them.)

How the pair of tech workers banded together to solve the code is pure
Silicon Valley. A couple of weeks after the semaphore patterns
started, Snesrud and Mayo met at a "communication skills" seminar in
San Jose. Actually, it was a workshop on how to flirt with women.

After dinner one night, the two set out looking for downtown San Jose
hangouts to try their new skills. Crossing Almaden Boulevard between
bars, their attention was drawn to the spinning disks on top of the
Adobe tower. For anyone wondering, this is not a sign that your
flirting techniques are working.

Since they weren't getting anywhere with the ladies that night, the
pair decided to figure out what was going on with those shapes.

The four disks, made up of 24,000 light-emitting diodes with a dark
line through the center, could be seen from as far away as Highway 87.
They would spin every 7.2 seconds, resulting in a different pattern.

"It was not a real easy thing to figure out," said Snesrud, who lives
in San Francisco and works as a chip designer for Santa Clara-based
W&W Communications. He's got real flair for understatement.

It helped that Mayo, 47, had plenty of free time since his job as a
computer scientist at Hewlett-Packard labs had ended. At one point, he
photographed hours' worth of the patterns from a parking garage near
the Adobe building. They considered setting up an AM radio near the
site to capture the low-wattage broadcast transmitted from the
building to offer more clues, but they worried people might think
their contraption was a bomb.

Then, they discovered everything they needed - both the rotating disks
and the audio broadcast - was on the project's Web site
(www.sanjosesemaphore.com), so they realized they didn't need to stare
up at the Adobe tower for hours.

With more time to peruse the codes, they figured out how to match up
certain patterns with ASCII characters, the language used by most
computers to translate text to numbers. They then translated those
patterns and realized they were based on passages from the James Joyce
novel "Ulysses" - and those passages were the key to translating the
rest of the message. (Their entire solution, plus a decoding guide by
the artist who created the semaphore, are available at
www.mercurynews.com).

>From there, it was a lot of trial and error, using computer programs
to discern patterns until all the pieces fell together.

When they began deciphering the data into words, they did what
everyone else in Silicon Valley does when presented with a problem:
They put the words - including unusual ones such as Dominus and
calumet - into Google.

The search engine spit out the Pynchon book, and they realized the
message was its entire text.

"I can't say I'd read it before," Snesrud said. "But it's a very
interesting book."

Ben Rubin, the New York artist who designed the project, applauded the
pair's "computational brute force" in finding the message.

"I'm especially glad the code was cracked and that it was done in a
very classical way," Rubin said.

The book by Pynchon, a former Aptos resident, is set in a fictional
California city filled with high-tech campuses. The story follows a
woman's discovery of latent symbols and codes embedded in the
landscape and local culture, Rubin said.

"I thought the book resonated really well with the project," he said,
adding that it took several months to transmit the entire text of the
book. "It's been looping for a while."

Snesrud and Mayo translated only about an eighth of the message, but
it was enough for them to present their solution. For their smarts,
the two didn't win any money - just the recognition of solving Silicon
Valley's public art mystery.

There are no plans to stop the semaphore or change its message, at
least for the time being, Rubin said.

Having the solution out there will "change the way people look it,"
Rubin said of having the solution known. "Maybe in a few years, we'll
revisit it."

So will their celebrity status help Snesrud and Mayo when it comes to
flirting? Snesrud, 37, has a girlfriend now, so he's doing fine. Mayo,
who now lives in Seattle but is considering moving back to Silicon
Valley, still is trying.

"I keep talking about encryption on my dates and it doesn't seem to
help," he said.

http://www.mercurynews.com/salpizarro/ci_6626955