Q: About three-quarters the way through the Illustrated Hitchhikers Guide there is a strange illustration of 42 multi-coloured balls lined up in columns 6x7. I can only assume this is the famed "42 Puzzle". My question is, how do you play? What's the puzzle?
DNA: The point of the puzzle was this: Everybody was looking for hidden meanings and puzzles and significances in what I had written (like 'is it significant that 6 * 9 is 42 in base 13?'. As if.) So I thought that just for a change I would actually construct a puzzle and see how many people solved. Of course, nobody paid it any attention. I think that's terribly significant.
It sounds somewhat equally exciting to, and less frustrating than, releasing software and seeing all the ways people break it.
Congratulations & good luck. I'm sure it will take you to interesting places!
[1] https://www.buttercookie.de/The%20Burkiss%20Way/Transcripts/...
"The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story."
But of course nobody is an entirely reliable narrator, and certainly not the author of The Guide so... Maybe?
(Edit: I see a peer respondent already linked it, but I'll leave this anyway)