McGuffin Ho! Inscrutable Wisdom of the East

This puzzle was at a giant gear statue in some industrial neighborhood. Alas, I don't know where it was.

I no longer have the materials for this puzzle, so I am fuzzy on the details. I think we drove to some industrial neighborhood. Behind a giant gear, there was a box of puzzles. Our puzzle was a bag of fortune cookies.

Alexandra noticed that many phrases from the fortune cookie fortunes sounded like phrases from the I Ching. So Wesley pulled up the internet on his amazing wireless laptop, and we started reading up on the I Ching, scanning fortunes to figure out what they referred to.

The I Ching is a system of fortune-telling much beloved by computer scientists because it consists of 64 ideograms, each of which is illustrated as a six-bit binary value. Hmm... 6 bit binary, was game control using I Ching ideograms to encode ASCII?

Here, I made a bad assumption. Or rather, a long-held assumption finally caused me trouble here. I knew that each I Ching ideogram had a number associated with it, its place in the King Wen arrangement/ordering. And as a responsible computer scientist, I knew that each ideogram could be thought of as a 6-bit value. My false assumption: I believed that the ancient Chinese seers ordered the ideograms as suggested by the pictured binary numbers. But that was not the case.

But people kept on telling me that I wasn't making sense, and eventually we noticed that we should be using the ideogram-based numbering system instead of the King Wen numbering system.

Eventually, we had our answer: we were going to the Burlingame Caltrain Station.

Next: Putting the Game in Burlingame[&gt];

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