Q's Cubes
160 points Hard

For Christmas, Q received an enormous set of cubes with letters and numbers on them. He decided that rearranging these cubes in a certain way would let him hide a secret message. The way he rearranges them is by folding all of them in half, over and over, until they form a single pillar. This is explained in more detail here: - https://mega.nz/#!raBixa7b!HkrNMoGU3kutVtGmrS81y-7Yx4VSO1JorlUICD4XOIM - Q leaves us this aerial view (your input) of his cubes here: https://mega.nz/#!KOJyFKKL!2dNvk97L09sUwfM4DVtZ_logrtvlYzWwZvtur6C-_DU :: What message was Q trying to convey?

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Discussion

That was far more tedious than I expected (in hindsight pen and paper might have been easier). Spent a lot of time deciding how to model the "cubes", and then spent a few hours trying to find a pattern in how the square of cubes becomes a row of cubes - there were visual patterns, but nothing that looked like it could be turned algorithmic very easily (I might revisit this later).

Then I went back to implementing a simulation (quite inefficiently). Set up a data structure to hold 256 * 256 *256 (it never holds more than 256 elements, but it seemed easier to wrangle), and p[lace all the elements in [0,x,y].<br /> The basically there was a fold process, followed by shifting all the elements so that the lowest was at [0,0,0] (this is sort of unnecessary, but made the logic simpler for me)....

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Good one. can use pen and paper.

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Very nice challenge! (numpy may prove useful)

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watch out for the flag, because it's not a string but sentences

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