From Barcodes to Unicode. We have come a long way. What does the future hold?
Statements about computing resources age like milk. "640K ought to be enough for anybody.", or: "No one will ever need more than 32-bit addressing." But for the time being, Unicode has sufficient space.
At the time of writing, the latest version of Unicode is version 16.0.0 and it encodes a total of 154,998 characters. With surrogate pairs, UTF-16 has potential room for 1.1 million characters. The encoding scheme underlying UTF-8 has theoretical room for 2 billion characters, although for compatibility reasons, it's limited to the same set as UTF-16.
For comparison, the Merriam Webster dictionary contains 470,000 words. Even after making a corresponding emoji for every word in the dictionary, there will be room to spare.
What does this all have to do with today's puzzle? That's for you to figure out.
Anyway, here is your test input in Base64
//6y2+rcatqq3nvayN9q2qrebtqv3uLaqt5q2ojcP9mE3Craatws2frfxtmZ3uza+N4i2ijdLNj839rZ
Wt2n2KbcsttZ3CDbgd532sjfZdmz3TLab98m2rbdEtrv3mDaqt9q2q/e4tq63mraqt5/2o7catqq3mja
+N4G2mvfK9v839rZCt2Hm7LbWdzt2azeQ9rI32TZpd0i2m/f49qZ39rZWt5/24bcMtoJ3qXa/N7W2Ync
YNiq37Lbqtxq2rrea9rI32rart5q2qzeqgI=
Write a program that decodes this message. How it is encoded exactly, is a secret. All I can tell you is that the test input decodes to:
ꪪꪪꪪ This is a secret message. ꪪꪪꪪ Good luck decoding me! ꪪꪪꪪ
In order to solve the puzzle, you must decode the puzzle input in the same way.
Decode the message and follow the instructions. What is the answer according to the instructions?
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