what's that number?

December 22, 2011 8:27 AM

What's this number?

I'll make it easy. The first digits are 080652937

I'm stuck on the last two. I'm thinking 96 due to the white spaces. Thoughts?

posted by leotrotsky to Technology (14 answers total)

96/56 98/58
posted by littlesq at 8:32 AM on December 22, 2011

oh wait, i just realized instead of a 9 it might be a 3
posted by littlesq at 8:33 AM on December 22, 2011

Response by poster: I'm thinking not a 3 due to the curve above the white space
posted by leotrotsky at 8:34 AM on December 22, 2011

06063297[3]
posted by 3FLryan at 8:38 AM on December 22, 2011

Oops

I meant:

060632937[3]
posted by 3FLryan at 8:40 AM on December 22, 2011

0606, then a 5 or a 3, 29379 and then either nothing, an 8 or a 3.
posted by griphus at 8:42 AM on December 22, 2011

I had some ideas but I think they're just stabs in the dark. A more accurate way of doing this would be to figure out what font it's in and superimpose one over the other in PhotoShop, PaintShop, etc, with a layer difference. Some problems with this approach are, of course, the artifacts (diagonal banding, shading, and monochrome dithering), which you'd have to try recreating, and especially the lack of context (what font it is, what's causing the banding, etc).
posted by crapmatic at 8:48 AM on December 22, 2011

06065293756 is my guess, with the suspect numbers being complete intuition on first glance.
posted by empyrean at 9:11 AM on December 22, 2011 [1 favorite]

There was a post just a little while ago I saw about decifering a license plate using mathmatica.com or something like that.. ah, yes.. here it is..

http://ask.metafilter.com/201542/Can-you-read-this-number-plate
posted by rich at 9:54 AM on December 22, 2011

Looking at the spacing, I don't think that's part of a final digit at the far right. If there is a digit after that 9, it's completely occluded by the black.
posted by Slap*Happy at 12:00 PM on December 22, 2011

I'm gonna say "95" are the last two digits. At first I was thinking "6" as the last digit but based on the font, it looks like the top of the 6's would curve downward slightly, while the top of the 5's would end with a horizontal "arm" to the right.

What's the story behind this picture, if I may ask?
posted by jwmollman at 4:45 PM on December 22, 2011

Response by poster: It's the audit number from my old Texas license. I scanned my license into evernote, but converted it to B&W in order to get character recognition. I need my texas driving record, and the state is an absolute pain to get records from. If I can deduce the audit #, I can do it online, instead of mailing something in and waiting 2 weeks.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:00 PM on December 22, 2011

I'd expect there's a checksum in there somehow, but I have no idea what scheme they might be using. If so, and if you can find the scheme, you can likely figure out what the last digit has to be.
posted by nat at 10:43 PM on December 22, 2011

Response by poster: It's '55'! I was helped by noticing that my wife's audit number is relatively proximate.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:08 PM on December 24, 2011