I think it has something to do with unicode, since 65536 characters are present in UTF-16 (2^16=65536). 63 also feels like something to do with encoding, since it’s close to 2^6, which is probably the smallest number of bits that can store the latin alphabet plus full punctuation. Maybe U+0063 and U+65536 are similar-looking characters or something? Maybe that’s only the case for a very rarely used UTF format?
Unfortunately, my computer’s default encoding is CP936, which screws up half of the characters in UTF-16, and I am unable to investigate further.
There are more characters than that in UTF-16, because it can represent the full Unicode range of >1 million codepoints. You’re thinking of UCS-2 which is deprecated.
So x = 63 in one base system and 65536 in another?
6*a+3=6*b^4+5*b^3+5*b^2+3*b+6
Wolfram Alpha provides this nice result. I also realize I should have just eyeballed it with 5th grade algebra.
Let’s plug in 6 for b, and we get… fuck.
I just asked it to find integer solutions.
There’s infinite solutions, so I’m just going to go with the lowest bases.
x=43449
Did I do it right? Took me like 15 minutes.
I like this, but it’s not the solution I intended.
I think it has something to do with unicode, since 65536 characters are present in UTF-16 (2^16=65536). 63 also feels like something to do with encoding, since it’s close to 2^6, which is probably the smallest number of bits that can store the latin alphabet plus full punctuation. Maybe U+0063 and U+65536 are similar-looking characters or something? Maybe that’s only the case for a very rarely used UTF format?
Unfortunately, my computer’s default encoding is CP936, which screws up half of the characters in UTF-16, and I am unable to investigate further.
There are more characters than that in UTF-16, because it can represent the full Unicode range of >1 million codepoints. You’re thinking of UCS-2 which is deprecated.
This puzzle isn’t related to Unicode though