FoxTrot by Bill Amend

Tags: 2009, 04, 19, Encryption, math, fox, Trot, 4/19/09, can, anyone, tell, me, what, the, code, means?, brandicats, Breaking, FoxTrot, favs, math1. Add Tags

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dumbadum said, 6 months ago

Excellent!
cmknoer77 said, 6 months ago

bleeep i was going for first post with the answer…bill is getting lazy some of the letters he didn’t use have non-numeric answers
ZetaZeta said, 6 months ago

Too bad you didn’t need to use the Integral.
welcor2 said, 6 months ago

Bill’s not getting lazy - they all resolve to numbers. There’s a difference between the minus (see H) and the division (see L) operators.
attyush said, 6 months ago

7-11-23-15-20-13-23-11-17-15-9-26

13-20-10-10-17-11-6-13-2-10
pgn674 said, 6 months ago

As I was doing these, I wondered if Bill writes SAT’s? They all have some elegance to them, making them easy to do in your head quickly if you recognize what he was getting at for each one. The trigonometric and calculus ones got me, though, just because I haven’t done that in a while.
ScatteringBliss said, 6 months ago

What a little turd!
Hugh B. Hayve said, 6 months ago

Wow, I’m amazed I can still do most of these in my head! (except for the trig, which I need a calculator for)
Wes_Bowie said, 6 months ago

The integral is 3x^3:

3(2^3) - 3(0^3) = 24
kfaatz925 said, 6 months ago

Wow… my brain’s not in gear today… that was fun, though!
mjensen9999 said, 6 months ago

19-13-16-11-16-11
MrGromit said, 6 months ago

I bet Bill gave millions of people a kick as this has been the first chance to do silly math like this in…ages!
mrprongs said, 6 months ago

The fun part is you don’t need to solve them all. Once you get the first few letters, it’s obviously Paige Fox. Which is pretty much what it’d be about given the two characters featured.
Native_Monado said, 6 months ago

She sure is, Jason… She sure is…
Ceroill2 said, 6 months ago

FUN? GAHHH! I’m with Paige on this one!
jackofstories said, 6 months ago

Thank you, fearciuil for letting me not do math on a Sunday. (not do grammar either)
LameRandomName said, 6 months ago

pgn674 says:
…making them easy to do in your head…
The trigonometric and calculus ones got me…
———————————–

Precisely. The comic is designed for the typical Sunday comic reading nudnik.
Step 1: Eliminate C, K, Q & U because they can’t be easily done in your head unless you are a Mathemagician.
Step 2: Pick out the repeats, especially 11, which has 4 repeats.
.ai…..i..a.at..at.
No, if you’re REALLY smart, or just good at Wheel of Fortune (I am neither) then you have it.

I had to solve for #16, which gave me “Pai…..i..a.at..at.”

I then solved for #2 & #18, which confirmed that I had to be looking at “Paige Fox i..a.at..at.”

On a hunch… OK, a guess, I solved for #8 and knew it had to be “Paige Fox is bad at .at.”

At which point I realized that I was going to have to solve for numbers 22 & 19.

Guess I’m a dumbass afterall…
tobybartels said, 6 months ago

Terrible! The Spanish version wasn’t translated: http://www.gocomics.com/espanol/foxtrotespanol/2009/04/19/

The Spanish translation of Fox Trot is often not as good as some others (especially Calvin and Hobbes, which seems to be quite good), but this time they didn’t even try!

(I gave it a shot, but my translation is probably not too hot either. But at least I have one!)
budgiekid90 said, 6 months ago

The mathematical expressions next to the letters all evaluate to some number between 1 and 26. Those give the corresponding letters for the numbers on top. With those correspondences, the numbers spell out “Paige Fox is Bad at Math.”
Jessica Malik said, 6 months ago

Awesome. ^_^
Kyler said, 6 months ago

I solved C and Q, only to realize that they are not in the sentence. D’oh!
PlainBill said, 6 months ago

From ‘The Notebooks of Lazarus Long’ by Robert A Heinlein

“Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable sub-human who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.”
VikingsDieHard said, 6 months ago

It’s best to not overthink it, and just use good standard ACT/SAT Math test methodology. Buzz through and do the ones you can easily do in your head. Also do those that still use basic Algegbra, but might require just a little, quick pencil work, and you will then find you are done. Any that might be a bit more challenging, for some, like C, K, Q, & U, turn out not to be needed, at all. My Trig is rusty, but turns out it dosen’t matter. An early clue is that there are 26 clues, but only 14 unique #s.
Miserichord said, 6 months ago

The Artemis Fowl books by Eion Colfer
use a substitution code of symbols for writing in “Elvish”. The “rosetta stone” for the code is given in the first book.

My great nephew at 7 could manage the books, but begged my help with the coded messages.
I explained how the code worked, and helped him work out the key.

We started decoding the messages, and he was astonished that, after ten or so messages, I started sight reading the code without using the key.

I supposed years of working in machine code trains the brain in pattern recognition.
Furienna said, 6 months ago

Wow, are you Americans better at Maths than us Europeans, or am I just an unusually stupid European? Because I can only understand B and D and H. And I thought I was rather good at Maths… :(
Dypak said, 6 months ago

My son likes to play around with codes. There is this code which is supposed to be an alien language on the show “Futurama”. It shows up all the time. It’s a substitution code. He broke it and keeps up with the messages on the show. Sometimes the messages are the best part of the show.
kramtterrag said, 6 months ago

8-13-6-6 11-22-10-20-17 13-23 11-4-10-23-15-22-10. 12-19-11-20-26-23 2-15-9 12-19-10 24-3-13-14! 25-10-9-21 10-20-7-15-21-11-8-6-10.
42Charles said, 6 months ago

I put the key on an Excel spreadsheet and then sorted the numbers.

The key looks like this:
1=C
2=F
3=U
4=W
5=G
6=L
7=J
8=B
9=R
10=E
11=A
12=T
13=I
14=Z
15=O
16=P
17=D
18=X
19=H
20=N
21=Y
22=M
23=S
24=Q
25=V
26=K

This was a lot of work for an obvious joke.
Machtyn said, 6 months ago

[quote]Step 1: Eliminate C, K, Q & U [/quote]
Oh come on people! Q is easy to do in your head if you’ve had your first or second year of high school calculus.
Integration is derivation backwards.
S[0..2] 9x^2 dx
(9/3)x^3|0..2
3(0)^3 + 3(1)^3 + 3(2)^3
0 + 3 + 3(8) = 3*9 = 27

K = |-26| = 26. That’s absolute value… which means whatever the number, it is always positive.

C = sin(Pi/2) = 1
U = -3 Cos(Pi) = -3 * -1 = 3
By the end of high school pre-algebra, you should have your trig functions memorized. Truly this will save you a lot of time the rest of high school and college.

Will you ever use this in the real world? Probably not (and I speak as a graduated CECS major working in software QA) except to solve Foxtrot comics ;)
…
Now, if you become an engineer of something, then you’ll use this stuff on a daily basis.
Machtyn said, 6 months ago

oops… I made a mistake in the integral (actually two… I caught one before posting). I’ve spent too much time in the upper algebra classes :-/

That should be 3(2^3) * 3(0^3) = 24.

If you must know, my first mistake was multiplying the 9 by 2.
Machtyn said, 6 months ago

3(2^3) * 3(0^3) = 24

That mistake is because it is midnight :p

3(2^3) - 3(0^3) = 24 - 0 = 24
drfloyd5 said, 6 months ago

Bravo. Excellent way to get your readers to flex their math muscles.
kenwhelan said, 6 months ago

Helo Bill

I don’t see the answer to K. I think it should be 26.

I don’t see the answer to Z. I think it should be -14/0 or “infinity.

Thanks for your help.

Take care.
Ken Whelan
ken@kwa.net
206 351 8177
hcaulfield said, 6 months ago

I don’t know if anyone pointed this out before me, but for letter L you must assume that x is not equal to zero ;D
janbruce said, 6 months ago

What fun!
fidget360 said, 6 months ago

-14/0 is not infinity. it’s an error message because you can’t divide zero. When you divide by zero the universe turns inside out and you can prove that 1=2 or that 1= (anything else you jolly well please), basically, all of mathematics breaks down. My math teacher in high school used to tell us that if you divide by zero, the math cops will come out and string you up by your toes from the flag pole and play tether-person with baseball bats.
EmacsUser2 said, 6 months ago

The operators in Z are dot (meaning multiply), not minus. Hence, no division by zero.
Xerloq said, 6 months ago

4-19-11-12-11-19-3-19
10-4-11-23-12-10-15-2
12-13-22-10-13-22-9
10-11-6-6-21-23-3-16
9-13-23-10-17-12-19-11
12-13-12-15-15-26-23
15-22-3-1-19-12-13
22-10-15-20-11-22-15
20-17-11-21-22-15-9-20
13-20-5-12-15-23-15-6
25-10-12-19-13-23-16-3
14-14-6-10-11-20-17-12
19-10-20-1-9-10-11-12
10-11-19-3-5-10-22-10
23-23-11-5-10-6-13-26
10-12-19-13-23-15-20
10-2-15-9-11-6-6-15-2
21-15-3-12-15-17-10-1
15-17-10
Machtyn said, 6 months ago

L evaluated at 0 would result in 0/0 = 1, right?

Some mathemagician named Brahmaguptra said this is 0 and that it is a fallacy to say it is equal to 1 (which results in 1=2 proofs). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_by_zero

I suppose he should have written L = (9x+9x)/3x | for all real numbers except 0
init4thelolz said, 6 months ago

wow. I can’t believe I can do every one in my head (except C, U, and Q)!
hikeeba.np said, 6 months ago

Ummm…what?

It has been too long since I’ve been out of school that when I’m faced with a wall of numbers like this that I blank. Plus I failed Algebra 2 and that’s as far as I ever got.

Taaaa-daaaaa…
Chikuku said, 6 months ago

Figured out the last three letters first - ATH - and intuited what the rest of the message had to be. In Spanish it would be: “Pagina Zorro es mala para la matematica.”
kramtterrag said, 6 months ago

Xerloq said “19-3-19-10”.
Did you mean to say “19-3-5-10”?
sandradurgan said, 6 months ago

it only took like ten minutes!
sandradurgan said, 6 months ago

26-10-6-6-21-4-11-13-19-10-9-10
semaphore said, 6 months ago

I was getting tired of translating all the comments people were posting, so I wrote a little Javascript app to do it:
http://www.amrittuladhar.com/projects/foxtrot/

I need to get some sleep…
suzyblackthorn said, 6 months ago

Thanks so much for this comic. It was lots of fun (although on the easy side). I could not read the rest of the comics until I finished it. MORE LIKE THIS!
Furienna said, 6 months ago

On the easy side? Then what do you consider hard? I think I’ll have to start crying now.
farren said, 6 months ago

Well, it was pretty easy math. Except for the trig and integration ones (C, Q, U). And even those are easy if you can remember trig and calculus. Weird thing is, I’ve been in computing for forty-five years now, and never had to use either. Not like they told me, not at all.
Furienna said, 6 months ago

Oh well, when I think about it, I can do A, B, D, H, J, M, O, P, T and Y, and prehaps G, S, V, W, X and Z, if I used a calculator. But still, I’m lost at the other ones. I never thought, that I was a genius at maths, but this really makes me think I’m stupid.