Engineer Cracks Adobe HQ's Longtime Semaphore Puzzle

For three years, four spinning circles atop Adobe's San Jose headquarters have been quietly hiding a Renaissance secret. The company now says that software engineer Brian Vincent finally cracked the rooftop "San Jose Semaphore," deciphering the rotations as instructions for reconstructing part of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus"—specifically, a single rose from the painting, per KRON4. The artwork, designed by media artist Ben Rubin, uses four circles that each display four positions, yielding 256 possible combinations and shifting every 7.2 seconds.

Earlier versions of the long-running puzzle—which NBC Bay Area notes were solved in 2007 and 2017, respectively—encoded the full text of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and the audio of Neil Armstrong's moon-landing line: "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." This third iteration, in place since May 2023, encoded color data in pixels of digital images to build the final graphic. Vincent, who spent years studying the pattern, called the challenge "probably perfect"—simple at its core but grueling in practice. With the code now solved, Adobe says a fourth semaphore is in the works, with a two-year Creative Cloud subscription, and "bragging rights," awaiting the next decoder. More here from Adobe on the puzzle.