"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> So, I have so far managed to backtrack my way from the beginning, all the way to
> the first number: 11117333955
> But I need to add a 10-decimal place "correction factor" at each step.

In Excel and OpenOffice Calc,
> 0.0311342675 does the trick.

POV-Ray 3.8 needs  0.031130802

Now the interesting part.
I managed to hunt down a lot of information about solving for a particular N
that makes the two modulo operations work together, which gave me confirmation
about a "starting value" and the core multiplier.

I thought, "maybe the spreadsheet stuff that I have is only needed to backtrack.
 Perhaps those very very specific values aren't needed, and freshly computed
values forward will give me the same decoded points when I run the macros..."

NOPE.  Warp's algorithm is sensitive to even the last digit.
His number 11117333955 gives a nice, straight, crisp "W"
                     ^
Even using 11117333956 makes it lean off to the right and just look wonky.
                     ^

So if this whole thing is SO sensitive to the value of a fudge factor in the
generation algorithm, and the decoding algorithm doesn't even give results that
are close when the encoded value if off by a single digit - how the Hell did he
figure it all out and get it to work forwards and backwards?

I mean, I have some weird operations going on, where I did the (bad) thing of
letting the answers guide me, so I have no real idea why they're necessary to
get the proper intermediate values - but I don't really have any "first
principles" to guide me in place of that.
So I'm thinking that there needs to be a "cleaner" more reliable way to do the
encoding than what I'm doing.

- BE

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