M Puzzle: Stained Glass

by Lance Nathan

The first step of this puzzle is taking the cue from the priest that the exact colors are relevant. Loading the stained glass window into a graphics editor (such as GIMP, available on Athena), it's possible to use a tool to get the exact hex color of each pane. Each pane is pure red, green, or blue, so that only two digits of each are non-zero. The colors of the panes, and their sums, are as follows.

1770000008600000076778676
2000099790000009700799799
3008800000099770000778899
4990000008800000088998888
5000087690000007700697787
6008900000079880000888979
7990000007700000087997787
8000088660000007800667888
9008700000077990000998777
10880000008800000066888866
11000077660000007700667777
12006600000097860000866697
13990000007800000078997878
14000068760000006900766968
15009900000067760000769967
16660000008800000078668878
17000089880000007900887989
18007600000086770000777686

The discussion of "changes," the fact that these are all strings of six digits which are all 6, 7, 8, or 9, and the eight by eight table headed by a father, mother, and six children all suggest the I Ching, whose trigrams are associated with the eight members of a family. 7 stands for masculine, 8 for feminine; 6, feminine changing to masculine, and 9, masculine changing to feminine.

Each string of six digits can be taken to be a pair of hexagrams. For instance, the hexagram in the first row, 778676, can be taken as a move from 778777 to 778878. The pairs (not in order) are therefore:

Taking the floor tiles as a grid, then, and labelling each row and column with the trigrams, one can trace lines (just as the boss paced them out on the floor) from the first hexagram in each pair to the second. These give (more or less, depending on how square your grid is):

and the answer is MOOD.

Training:

The training is M TO F CHANGE, and this gives the new answer, FOOD.