Brian Vincent, a software engineer from San Jose, has solved the third Adobe Semaphore puzzle — a cryptographic public-art installation that has been spinning coded messages from the roof of Adobe's downtown headquarters since 2006.

The San Jose Semaphore is one of the Bay Area's most obscure cultural monuments: four ten-foot LED wheels, 18 stories up on Adobe's Almaden Tower, that slowly rotate through positions encoding a hidden message. Each iteration takes years to crack, and each solved message has turned out to be something worth the wait. Vincent's solve, completed this past spring and announced by Adobe this week, closes out the third chapter — and a fourth puzzle is already in development.

There's a set of four glowing disks on top of Adobe's Almaden Tower in downtown San Jose that most people walk past without a second glance. They spin, slowly, cycling through positions — and they've been transmitting an encrypted message for nearly three years. This spring, someone finally figured out what it said.

Brian Vincent, a San Jose software engineer, cracked the third iteration of the San Jose Semaphore, Adobe announced this week. The company said Vincent solved the puzzle in spring 2026 — roughly three years after Adobe launched the third challenge in May 2023, according to NBC Bay Area.

The Semaphore is the creation of Ben Rubin, a New York-based artist who works at the intersection of technology and public space. Rubin designed the original installation in 2006, commissioning four bisected LED discs spanning 70 feet of the 18th floor of Adobe's Almaden Tower. The wheels don't physically spin — they're programmed to appear that way, cycling through positions every few seconds to spell out a message in visual semaphore code.

The first puzzle ran from 2006 until 2007, when two San Jose-area scientists, Bob Mayo and Mark Snesrud, decoded it in about six weeks. Their prize: 800 paragraphs of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, the 1966 novel about a woman entangled in a shadowy postal conspiracy. The duo published a whitepaper on their methods.

The second puzzle, launched in October 2012, proved considerably harder. It took nearly five years before a high school math teacher from Knoxville, Tennessee — Jimmy Waters — cracked it in 2017. Waters had stumbled onto the Semaphore while researching Pynchon online. Noticing there was a new code, he spent months watching and transcribing the wheel sequences from thousands of miles away. He eventually realized certain patterns might represent silence in an audio file, fed his data into audio software, and found himself listening to Neil Armstrong's 1969 moon landing broadcast — ending with "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

"There was a part of me that knew I solved it, but I wondered is that really it?" Waters told the Mercury News in 2017. "It seemed so simple once I did that. But how could I just end up by chance getting the audio for the moon landing?"

It's a characteristically Bay Area kind of puzzle: technologically baroque, humanistically ambitious, and free to anyone willing to stand on a sidewalk and stare at a building long enough.

Vincent's solution to the third puzzle — what message it contained — hasn't been publicly disclosed by Adobe. The company's semaphore page, where fuller details about Vincent's methods and Rubin's design are supposedly hosted, was not accessible at publication time. Adobe has encouraged curious readers to visit adobe.com/sj-semaphore for the full account.

What is clear is the pace: the first puzzle fell in roughly one year; the second held out for nearly five; the third, in three. A fourth puzzle is already in development, Adobe said, and unlike its predecessors — which were announced to a relatively small community of enthusiasts — will be marketed more openly to anyone who wants to take a shot.

The Semaphore has outlasted multiple waves of San Jose development, survived the pandemic, and kept spinning through the tech industry's boom-bust cycles. Whatever the message was, someone in this city took the time to find it.