Nigel came inside from his back garden carrying the peas he'd harvested, and dumped them onto the table to be sorted according to which were edible and which weren't. Just as he did so, he noticed a letter lying on the table, now mostly buried by the peas, in what looked like the handwriting of his colleague Richard. He scrabbled through the sour pods, picked up the cryptic missive, and read:
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128
I1, Y1, O8, A5, R1, U6, V3, M4, D2, A4, S4, U3, E3, J1, E11, A13, M2, I3, A2, F3, I6, O5, W1, S4, Y3, A14, U4, S1, P1, A8, E6
What does the message say?
Answer
The bit in the text about
scrabbling through the sour pods
is a hint that this has to do with
Scrabble, and the so-called SOWPODS word list.
The list of powers of two indicates
that we should consider two-letter words.
So we'll make use of
the list of 2-letter words in SOWPODS in alphabetical order as found e.g. here.
Now we interpret each item in the message as follows:
"I1" means "1st two-letter word beginning with I", "U6" means "6th two-letter word beginning with U". And then we take the second letter of each of these words.
So, e.g., we begin as follows:
I1 -> ID -> DY1 -> YA -> AO8 -> ON -> N
and eventually we get
DANGER!MEETMEATTENBYTHETOWNHALL
where the "!" represents
a word that doesn't exist (there are no 2-letter words in SOWPODS containing a V).
User IAmInPLS cunningly notes that
Nigel and Richard are two names extracted from the full name Nigel Richards, who is the world's highest-rated Scrabble player.
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