Actually, 127 (7 digits, not 8)ii otnemem ii wrote:A co-worker of mine mentioned this: if the Planet, Category, etc... were binary representations of numbers/ASCII characters, why would the researcher limit themselves to 255 samples? It's like a binary Y2K bug just waiting to happen.
They're not going by our definite of a 'byte', but the simplest number base of 2, so any # of digits can be intentional and understandable.
Which is why I broke the 35 digit string into its common denominators - 1,5,7,35. Either it's 5 strings of 7, 7 strings of 5, or 1 string of 35.
What those values should be converted to is debatable. Anything other than 8 bits is doubtfully ascii, maybe 7; let alone unicode at 16 bits. 5 bits is the largest size to represent our 26 letter alphabet, possibly including 0-9. Anything else, we might convert to decimal (base 10) to understand the value, but base 10 is a human numeric system as well.
HOWEVER, considering the document is ascii text, they must understand our 8bit character set, in which case they should also understand base 10. So converting any of these numbers to decimal might reveal something, including converting it from a 35 digit binary string.
So really, we have no leads and no idea as to what to do with it.