Cicada 3304

The blue und green parts of this image seem to be scrambled. The red text gives some cryptic hints on what to do. Especially "A new view changes everything." and "There are several factors of success" indicate that the image has to be transformed to another aspect ratio so that the blue and green text become visible. The number of pixels in the original image is $p = 330 \cdot 330 = 2 ^ 2 \cdot 3 ^ 2 \cdot 5 ^ 2 \cdot 11 ^ 2$ . With 8 prime factors, there are $2^8$ ways to represent the number $p = a b$ as the product of two numbers $a$ and $b$ . We can reduce the number of possible aspect ratios if we assume that width $a$ and height $b$ should not fall below a certain value, because otherwise letters and numbers cannot be represented (in my case this minimum value is 16 pixels). Nevertheless, you have to try a variety of aspect ratios and create a series of new images until you come across something meaningful. The "factors of success" are 99 x 1100 and 900 x 121, which produce the following images.

The latter is the Morse code representation of the number 7369, so the total code number is 56117369 .

The following Python program generates this series of reshaped images (59 images in total). It uses the numpy function reshape , which transforms an array to another representation.

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import numpy as np
from PIL import Image

pic = Image.open("Cicada3304.png")
height, width, cl = pic.shape
for w in range(16, width*height//16):
    if width*height % w == 0:
        Image.fromarray(pic.reshape(width*height//w, w, cl)).save("{}x{}.png".format(w, width*height//w))