Velcro consists of a hooky side and a loopy side. Hooks will stick to loops and vice versa, but neither hooks or loops will stick to each other. Typically Velcro is manufactured with all the hooks on one side and all the loops on the other side, but it ought to be possible to manufacture Velcro strips which switch from hooks to loops and back along their length.

Gold codes are sets of pseudorandom binary sequences with minimal cross-correlations. If a Gold-code-modulated Velcro strip is correctly aligned with its inverse counterpart, all the hooky bits will match up with loopy bits on the other strip, and maximal adhesion will be obtained. However if the strips are misaligned, or belong to different members of the family of codes, only about half of the hooky bits will match up with loopy bits, and the bond between the strips will be correspondingly weaker.

The obvious practical applications of this invention are far too numerous to list here.
-- Wrongfellow, Mar 25 2017

Brilliant! A golden croissant for you.
-- csea, Mar 25 2017


Gold codes and Gray codes are both named after their inventors, so I suppose your question is what other inventors are named after colours, undiscovered or otherwise.
-- Wrongfellow, Mar 25 2017


(marked-for-tagline)

" The obvious practical applications of this invention are far too numerous to list here "
-- normzone, Mar 25 2017


I just looked up Gold codes in Wikipedia, and it seems that the idea is that Gold codes have minimal cross- correlation with other Gold codes, not with misaligned versions of themselves. In light of that, I suggest basing the Velcro pattern on Golomb rulers instead.

Also, I always wondered how CDMA worked, so thanks for making me look that up.
-- notexactly, Mar 27 2017


Low autocorrelations are a property of maximal length sequences in general, and this property applies to Gold codes too.

Yes, they're used for CDMA radio. This is how I first learned about them almost 20 years ago, in my first job working on modems for satellites.
-- Wrongfellow, Mar 27 2017


A little bit of research suggests that, if this Velcro were to be made available, it could be used to find prime numbers, simply by seeing which long pieces of Velcro stuck together.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Mar 27 2017



random, halfbakery