Simmons Hall

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KeywordsContent
start

Start by looking for patterns in the answers that feed into this meta-puzzle. You may notice some similarities in the letters used.

answers

All of the answers employ a specific set of letters. Furthermore, the lengths of the answers are the same, and there is something special about the center letters.

theme

Simmons Hall is sometimes colloquially called "The Sponge". This is related to our "carpet" problem.

carpet, sponge

The carpet in question is Sierpinski's carpet. Can you determine a way to generate Sierpinski's carpet using the image provided and the 9-letter feeder answers?

expand, iterate

Each of the feeder answers starts with a unique letter. This means that you can replace a letter with its corresponding feeder answer to expand the grid to the next iteration of Sierpinski's carpet.

center

I's and O's look a lot like 1s and 0s, don't they? Moreover, the first iteration happens to contain exactly 8 small black squares.

bits, binary, ascii

Reading the first iteration's black squares in row major order and interpreting I as 1 and O as 0, we get 01000001. Compare this result to the character listed for 1.1.

extraction

By treating I as 1 and O as 0, we can see that the first iteration, when read in row major order, results in the ASCII code for A. A similar pattern follows for later iterations. Your task is to find the characters corresponding to the given sequence at the bottom.

The carpets in Simmons are a bit wet... What can you use to dry them?

STS
EL
SLA

1.1: A
2.1: Y
2.2: T
2.3: A
2.4: -
2.5: )

3.6, 3.55, 4.23, 4.129, 5.1881, 3.13, 3.33, 3.60, 2.6, 5.510