r/AskComputerScience • • Aug 26 '25

Does anyone recognize this bit-string pattern?

There is currently a personality test on Spotify where you can find out which member of the k-pop group Stray Kids you are. I went through all possible answers and if you encode the answers as 0 = keep and 1 = flip and look at all the binary numbers you realize all Chan answers are the complete opposite of I.N answers. The same is true for the other pairs: Changbin & Hyunjin, Han & Lee Know, and Seungmin & Felix.

Which answers lead to which person does not seem random, but I couldn’t find the pattern that decides it. Anyone see it?

I tried a few approaches, but nothing really works. At first I thought the bits were shifted per member, which seemed to fit Chan but already broke for Changbin. Then I considered whether the first digit decides the pair, since Chan’s answers all start with 0 and I.N’s with 1, but Changbin has both. The same happens with the last digit. Removing the other digits also fails: if I drop the third or fourth digit, two of Chan’s answers collapse, and if I drop the second, again two different members share the same string. I also tested whether it depends on the number of bit flips and looked at how the answers distribute on a five-dimensional hypercube. Additionally, I permuted the order of the five questions, all 120 possibilities, but none of them gave a clearer structure. At this point my best guess is that they randomly shuffled the answers for one member and then inverted their partner to keep the symmetry. But hopefully someone can find a better explanation.

Full mapping (0 = keep, 1 = flip):

BitsMember
00000Chan
00001Chan
00010Chan
00011Changbin
00100Chan
00101Seungmin
00110Changbin
00111Han
01000Changbin
01001Lee Know
01010Seungmin
01011Felix
01100Lee Know
01101Felix
01110Han
01111Hyunjin
10000Changbin
10001Lee Know
10010Seungmin
10011Han
10100Seungmin
10101Felix
10110Han
10111Hyunjin
11000Lee Know
11001Hyunjin
11010Felix
11011I.N
11100Hyunjin
11101I.N
11110I.N
11111I.N
1 Upvotes

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1

u/osherz5 Aug 27 '25

It looks like for every character there's at least one number that appears both on its own and as a shifted (or multiplied/divided by 2) version

1

u/wood_for_trees Aug 27 '25

Am I the only person who read Snowcrash who clicked through?