The schematics describe a system that makes horizontal and vertical line segments coast from left to right, wrapping around a 16-character display. The data come from three components called "shift registers," which control individual lights (LEDs) within each character. A description is included as an imaginary data sheet.
The visual flow for each "pixel" in time:
U1 controls the top 3 LEDs for each character; U2 does LEDs 10 and 4 for each character, and U3 handles LEDs 1 and 2. This will be obvious to an electrical engineer.
It is assumed the solver will make a simulation in C and watch the output in a monospace XTerm window. If patient, the answer will appear at the 96th time step for R1=1k and R2, R3=2k. (To prevent the answer from being obvious, I shifted the final state data for Shift reg2 and Shift reg3 by 16 bits.)
| INITIAL STATE | ||||||||||||||||
| Shift reg1: | 111 | 100 | 101 | 110 | 001 | 110 | 001 | 110 | 100 | 000 | 101 | 110 | 000 | 000 | 110 | 000 |
| Shift reg2: | 10 | 00 | 00 | 10 | 10 | 11 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 11 | 11 | 11 | 01 | 00 | 01 | 11 |
| Shift reg3: | 11 | 00 | 01 | 11 | 10 | 10 | 11 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 01 | 01 | 00 | 11 | 00 | 01 |
| FINAL STATE (Timestep 96 for R1=1k, R2=2k, R3=2k) | ||||||||||||||||
| Shift reg1: | 111 | 100 | 101 | 110 | 001 | 110 | 001 | 110 | 100 | 000 | 101 | 110 | 000 | 000 | 110 | 000 |
| Shift reg2: | 10 | 11 | 11 | 11 | 01 | 00 | 01 | 11 | 10 | 00 | 00 | 10 | 10 | 11 | 10 | 10 |
| Shift reg3: | 10 | 10 | 01 | 01 | 00 | 11 | 00 | 01 | 11 | 00 | 01 | 11 | 10 | 10 | 11 | 10 |
In the final state, the following appears:
In other words--in Harvey Twyman's LCD font--"Physicist Werner." The answer is HEISENBERG.
Training:
The clear reference to "knitting" in the last line of the flavortext gives the training puzzle, Knitting. In spite of the suggestions that the untrained/trained answer is AUTHORITARIANISM/"Fearful Symmetry" (or LIBRARIAN/Travelers, say), the trained answer is actually MIND'S EYE.