Geocaching Puzzle Tools

Binary & Tupper Plotter

Turn a wall of ones and zeroes into a picture, or draw the image hidden inside a Tupper's formula constant.

Spaces, line breaks and anything that is not a 0 or 1 are ignored, so a block copied straight off a cache page works as it is.

Binary as a bitmap, and Tupper’s formula

A long run of ones and zeroes is often not a number at all but a picture, one bit per pixel. It only resolves at the right line width, which is why the divisors are offered above: at any other width the image is sheared into diagonal noise, and it is easy to conclude the data is meaningless when it is merely misaligned.

Tupper's formula is the same idea wearing a disguise. An enormous constant is treated as a bitmap, seventeen rows tall, and plotted. The famous example draws the formula itself, but any picture can be encoded that way, so a cache that hands you a five-hundred-digit number is very likely handing you an image.

  • Colour Decoder Read a grid of coloured squares as text: each colour is three bytes, which often spell out coordinates.
  • Decode Anything Throw a mysterious string at every common cipher at once, and see the readings ranked with anything coordinate-shaped at the top.
  • Bit Plane & LSB Viewer Inspect every bit plane of an image and pull out messages hidden in the least significant bits.