I didn't understand the answer until reading this thread, due to the off-by-one problem - I got randomness out of highlighting prime values, but highlighting odd numbers made the bold bit quite legible, though still noisy. The actual solution, not in bold, wasn't quite readable. I then manually entered exceptions to the odd/even rule - all even numbers which I had to make it treat as odd, as follows in hex:
Code: Select all
['01', '08', '0e', '14', '18', '1a', '20', '22', '26', '2c', '30', '32', '36', '38', '3e', '40', '44', '4a', '4c', '50', '54', '56', '5a', '5c', '5e', '62', '68', '6e', '72', '74', '76', '78', '7a', '7c', '80', '84', '86', '8c', '8e', '90', '92', '98', '9a', '9e', 'a0', 'a4', 'a8', 'aa', 'ae', 'b0', 'b6', 'b8', 'ba', 'bc', 'c2', 'c8', 'ca', 'cc', 'ce', 'd0', 'd4', 'd6', 'd8', 'da', 'dc', 'e0', 'e6', 'ea', 'ec', 'f2', 'f4', 'f6', 'f8', 'fc', 'fe']
Based on JanB's post, I guess this is the set of numbers one less than a composite odd number.
These index values are from Python's Image module. The message at the top was written in zeros; the message at the bottom in 0xff. So it exercises both ends of the spectrum - I guess some image libraries use values from 1 to 256 then.
In any case, it sucks if different image libraries use different numbering schemes, but it's good to know about. I think there are other challenges on the site which only work with Python's scheme.