So I've been thinking how would they communicate by blinking. My first thought was that they would use a combination of open eyes and closed eyes to express an idea, a word or maybe a letter. This would mean that you would need a certain amount of eyes to express every idea/word/letter they'd use. Which is confirmed by the librarian dialog. If you were to communicate several of these ideas/words/letters quickly, opening and closing your eyes quickly makes up for the appearance that you are blinking, hence a blinking language.
Since bonelords have 5 eyes, that means you could only have 32 different combinations of eyes open/closed. Now, the question is how would they write down these 32 non-terminal symbols (just what'll call these ideas/words/letters, based on a Context-Free Grammar). And my first idea, was to simply convert the numbers to binary. So for example:
Which unfortunately does not match the number of bits required. Unless of course they could use less than 5 eyes to blink some of their symbols. This doesn't seem very practical because they would need a way to hide their eyes essentially otherwise it would lead to some confusions. For example, if they were using only 2 eyes to express themselves, which of the 5 eyes are the ones conveying the symbols? There's no mention of it on the books so we'll just assume that you do need all 5 eyes.
Then I thought of what the librarian said as well, 1 is Tibia. How would you blink 1? So I thought, maybe they are padding their numbers. So 1, might actually be 00001. However, that brings up the question... why would Chayenne end up with 01 instead of just 1. Where would you pad these numbers in the first place...
There are some coincidences with the other text Chayenne left:
Most of these chunks repeat themselves in the first block. However, we are talking about 32 possible chunks so there's bound to be some repetition.
Some other thoughts:
32 possible combinations can make up for the English alphabet and then some more. So a combination of letters and words is technically possible. So 1 can be tibia and 2 (or 00010 if my theory is correct) could be 'a'.
What about 0? The librarian says it's an obscene number. Does it mean that closing all eyes would be an obscene gesture? I don't know. So I was just thinking... maybe they don't use 0 at all. 1 could actually be 00000. So maybe we substract 1 from the numbers. But I'm not entirely sure if that's the case. It wouldn't help with padding at all and it would probably only change the last 2 symbols.
Maybe 0 itself just can't be a block, maybe by itself it doesn't say anything at all.
Edit: I was grouping them from the MSB instead of the LSB. If you were to do it the other way around:
So I've been thinking how would they communicate by blinking. My first thought was that they would use a combination of open eyes and closed eyes to express an idea, a word or maybe a letter. This would mean that you would need a certain amount of eyes to express every idea/word/letter they'd use. Which is confirmed by the librarian dialog. If you were to communicate several of these ideas/words/letters quickly, opening and closing your eyes quickly makes up for the appearance that you are blinking, hence a blinking language.
Since bonelords have 5 eyes, that means you could only have 32 different combinations of eyes open/closed. Now, the question is how would they write down these 32 non-terminal symbols (just what'll call these ideas/words/letters, based on a Context-Free Grammar). And my first idea, was to simply convert the numbers to binary. So for example:
Chayenne said:
If I were to convert the first number to binary, I would get:
Which if I were to break it down into 5 bits (for each eye) I would get:
Which unfortunately does not match the number of bits required. Unless of course they could use less than 5 eyes to blink some of their symbols. This doesn't seem very practical because they would need a way to hide their eyes essentially otherwise it would lead to some confusions. For example, if they were using only 2 eyes to express themselves, which of the 5 eyes are the ones conveying the symbols? There's no mention of it on the books so we'll just assume that you do need all 5 eyes.
Then I thought of what the librarian said as well, 1 is Tibia. How would you blink 1? So I thought, maybe they are padding their numbers. So 1, might actually be 00001. However, that brings up the question... why would Chayenne end up with
01instead of just1. Where would you pad these numbers in the first place...There are some coincidences with the other text Chayenne left:
Most of these chunks repeat themselves in the first block. However, we are talking about 32 possible chunks so there's bound to be some repetition.
Some other thoughts:
32 possible combinations can make up for the English alphabet and then some more. So a combination of letters and words is technically possible. So 1 can be tibia and 2 (or 00010 if my theory is correct) could be 'a'.
What about
0? The librarian says it's an obscene number. Does it mean that closing all eyes would be an obscene gesture? I don't know. So I was just thinking... maybe they don't use 0 at all. 1 could actually be 00000. So maybe we substract 1 from the numbers. But I'm not entirely sure if that's the case. It wouldn't help with padding at all and it would probably only change the last 2 symbols.Maybe 0 itself just can't be a block, maybe by itself it doesn't say anything at all.
Edit: I was grouping them from the MSB instead of the LSB. If you were to do it the other way around: