Happy Birthday, Aina!
Alex and Aina had just moved into their charming new home in Beacon Hill. The brick-lined streets reminded Aina of the historic alleys back in Spain, except with more bumpy bike lanes, while Alex was excited to start his PhD. The house was perfect, but it still needed that personal touch, and possibly some paint and hanging shelves, to feel like home.
Alex’s family flew in from Seattle to help them settle in. Boxes were everywhere, and the walls looked bare. Determined to hang their favorite furniture and decorations, they unboxed their tools and the all-important instruction manual. And hanging the damn paintings turned out to be more complicated than they ever could have expected!
In the midst of the chaos, they found a mysterious, ancient papyrus scroll in one of the boxes labeled SDML. It was coded in a strange way…
The front of the scroll consisted of lines of text, and the back a clearly encoded message. On each line of text on the front, there was a string of numbers and letters.
They thought for awhile, and then it dawned on them that the correct answer was to be found by combining the first digit and the last digit (in that order) to form a single two-digit number. The sum of all of these numbers produced a code, which let them decipher the text on the scroll!
For example, when they were thinking, they considered the following line:
1abc2 pqr3stu8vwx a1b2c3d4e5f treb7uchet
Here, the correct digits were 12, 38, 15, and 77. Adding these together produced 142.
The entire scroll was recorded on an ancient website link here. The answer, the sum of all of the measurements, needs to be put in the input box below!