Coldplay X&Y Artwork Code CRACKED!

Coldplay fans have succeeded in cracking the code featured on the bands new cover art. Well done Owen!

The band astounded fans last week when they launched the artwork for the eagerly awaited new album 'X&Y', featuring a series of cryptic colour-coded blocks. Now it has been discovered that the actual blocks are graphical representations loosely based on a binary code known as 'Baudot', which generates a base5 binary representations for each letter or character in the western alphabet.

The 'baudot' code has been used extensively in telegraph systems. It is a five bit code invented by the Frenchman Emile Baudot in 1870. Using five bits allowed 32 different characters. To accomodate all the letters of the alphabet and numerals, two of the 32 combinations were used to select alternate character sets.One mathematically clued-up fan told Stereoboard.com: "Actually it doesn't matter about the colours, they are only there for aesthetics.

"The importance to the code is actually whether the coloured block is there or not, so is the graphic a zero or a one? For example on the album artwork the letter X is 10111 and Y is 10101 and the symbol for & has to be firstly activated with a sort of SHIFT character, which is 11011. So the & symbol is actually 11011 01011. All pretty confusing, but pretty much explanative when you can see the pattern that is present."

What is rather strange though is that the album title that is represented by this code actually depicts 'X-Y' based on the General version of Baudot's code (there was no & in the original version) and 'X9Y' in the new amended versions of the code. To depict the album cover correctly the grey/white blocks are missing on the 3rd line of the album artwork.

Source: Stereoboard.com