THE PROBLEMIsrael → America
Noah wants to send Sam a cup
Noah is in Israel, looking at his cup. Sam is in America — on the other side of the world — and Noah wants to show it to him right now.
Luckily Noah has a phone — and a phone is a computer. It can do it in a blink.
But the cup never leaves the table. A computer never turns a cup into anything. It builds a symbolic representation of it — and then represents that symbolically, again and again, until it reaches something a cable can carry:
Four little games below, one for each of those symbolic representations. Then Sam gets the cup.
GAME 1 · PIXELS36 dots here · millions in a real photo
The dots
A photo isn't the cup. It's the cup represented symbolically — as a grid of dots called pixels, like a spreadsheet.
And every dot is itself represented as three numbers: red, green, blue. Flip the grid and look.
GAME 2 · COUNTINGten symbols vs two
The count
All counting is one rule: run out of symbols, roll to zero, carry a one.
Base two just runs out sooner.
0 = 000000
Why count in base two at all? Because the phone must rewrite every number this way before it can send it. Here's 42:
GAME 3 · LIGHT1 = flash · 0 = dark
The flash
But why ones and zeros? Because they can be represented symbolically as light: 1 = flash, 0 = darkness.
Nothing turns into light — the light stands for the ones and zeros. Compose your own byte below and send it down the wire.
THE FINALE · ISRAEL → AMERICA9,000 km · the speed of light
The cup that crossed an ocean
Except the cup never moved. What crossed the ocean was a symbolic representation of it — represented symbolically again at every rung, and never once turned into anything.
Down the ladder: cup → picture → base ten numbers → base two numbers → light. Up the far side: the same rungs, read back in reverse. And that's the whole point of doing it — once something is represented symbolically as light, it can cross the world, and be worked on, at the speed of light.
psst — double-tap the ocean for a secret game ✨