4

Spoilers for JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 6: Stone Ocean (Jail House Lock! arc)


Emporio gives Jolyne a sheet of handwritten binary code and wants her to print it out. Jolyne takes this and prints out a picture using her stand.

I can't understand how she manages to decode it by herself. Star Platinum can quickly draw a photo-realistic image of a fly it saw but that doesn't apply here. Stone Free is "decoding" something, not copying.

How can Stone Free decode binary code?


The sheet of binary code:

Emporio holding the encoded picture

Printout:

Jolyne's decoded picture

1 Answer 1

3

Stone Free actually is copying rather than decoding here.

Emporio's sheet of binary numbers isn't a coded message in the way that, say, Bacon's cipher uses "00000" to represent the letter "A", "00100" to represent the letter "E", and so on. It's literally binary text in the sense that there are only two possible values: 0 or 1; on or off; white or black.

Say the numbers written on the sheet looked like this:

000000
010010
000000
100001
011110
000000

If I told you to replace each "0" with a period and each "1" with a pound/hash symbol, you'd get:

......
.#..#.
......
#....#
.####.
......

See the smiley? :)

This is basically how Jolyne turns the binary numbers into an image with Stone Free: replace each "0" with one shape, and each "1" with a second shape, and a pattern emerges. In your second image, the shaded areas have a white "1" superimposed while the unshaded areas have a black "0" superimposed; my opinion is that the numbers are a visual aid for the reader's benefit, while Jolyne could be forming her string into shapes that create a high contrast between light and dark.

The anime adaptation of this scene uses a more digital representation, with Jolyne making her string travel underneath each "0" and above each "1", moving vertically between numbers whenever they change to the other value.

You must log in to answer this question.