Slashdot Mirror
Anticryptography
Lisa Mann of O'Reilly sent us this story about anticryptography - sending messages which are easy to understand rather than the reverse. This is something which has applications in communicating both extraterrestrially and on Earth.
The article begins: "Ever since Mosaic, the computer industry has been obsessed with cryptography.".
Uh-huh. That long. Wow.
Does someone want to tell these guys about World War II?
Ah, heck.
--Blair
"Next week: How to Patent Chisambop."
Uhh, it's obvious YOU didn't read the article.
That was my point...the (Intellectual property?) thing was THEIRS, not mine.
This is an EX-PARROT!
I ran an ad on a cab.
All your event are belong to us.
In the adventure video game Rama, based off of Arthur C. Clarke's books, you had to learn some alien languages composed of different symbols. The game allowed you to play with an alien octal calculator, then offered some problems to see if you understood the symbols and the math.
Rich
This article has a lot more to offer the computing world than it does the SETI world. It proposes a way of distributing code and applications that could, in one quick stroke, get rid of all the damn library-dependency issues that are continually cropping up.
This is a great idea for an operating system / library environment!
Someone should convince sourceforge to start handing out universal version numbers with each project. A unique number could identify the project, then the developer could add a number to identify what platform it runs on and a few more digits to give it versioning information. Then, an RPM-like package manager could be queried by the software at run-time to ensure that all the packages that are needed are present. When not found the software can query the user until an automated and secure distribution scheme can be developed.
In this way, an incremental step could be made toward a system that completely describes itself. Now all we need is someone with sufficient clout to take up this behemoth of a project - or lend their support to it anyway. Linus, where are you?!
Rudy Moore
1. 2.
It is unfortunate how there is no completely universal language (no, music doesn't count).
Several bases might work. Except, that could also confuse. Less similarity amongst the statements.
Binary could work but there are a few catches. Do they interpret binary numbers left to right or right to left? Are they read right to left in 4 byte chunks, and then left to right for the next 4? Do they use trits instead (0, 1, and 2)?
The component system does seem like a good idea, but it's actually almost what we've got now. In Perl, if you're missing a module you can usually grab it off CPAN if it's a popular one - that could be automated. You could even introduce more general language extensions to help:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use HTML::Parse available at http://www.somesite.com/perl/htmlparse/;
use Math::FuzzyLogic available at ftp://www.maththings.org/pub/math/fuzzylogic/;
use Popular::Module available via CPAN;
Each directory pointed to by an 'at' could house a .tar.gz, an .rpm, a .deb, etc., with an index thereof. The 'via' keyword could signal archives such as CPAN for which a more elaborate system is engaged.
Later you could add version control:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use HTML::Parse available at 'http://www.somesite.com/perl/htmlparse/', need 5.0;
use Math::FuzzyLogic available at 'ftp://www.maththings.org/pub/math/fuzzylogic/', need 4.1.7+;
use Popular::Module available via 'CPAN', need 1.2+;
ET Message, loud and clear:
Hello gentlemen!!!
All your base are belong to us.
...please apply this concept to Calculus textbooks post-haste! I'm dyin' here!!
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
You don't need any base to transmit prime numbers. Just transmit 2 pulses, then 3, then 5, then 7, then 11. 11 pulses is still the same number of pulses if you represent it as 11(base 10), B(base 12-infinity), or 1011(base 2).
Pi would have to be represented in some base, unless there is some way to represent irrational numbers as discrete pulses or something. However, I think the problem could be solved by sending it in several bases. The ones I would suggest would be 2 and 12. 2 because the third law of logic makes it a desireable base to do logical type things in, and 12 because using 12 as a base makes numbers much easier to factor. These are the two most logical bases to use IMO. You could also include derivative bases such as 16, or 60 if you feel it is necessary for clarification.
(And can a GnuPG and anti-GnuPG exist on the same drive, without converting into raw bits?)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I was going to post something about how not even Stephenson thought of this first, but then another thought occurred to me. This may not work very well. Here's what triggered that thought:
"Let's say i look up a piece of code. if I do not understand something I can look it up, and heave the thing teach me, from first principles using anti-crypt methods if necessary, everything I need to know, starting with addition or even with basic literacy if necessary."
EVERYTHING? Consider a simple piece of (psuedo) code:
Get X from user
For i = 2 to sqrt(x) do
if x mod i = 0
print "composite"
end
print "prime"
end
Let's say you didn't understand this. What's the primer going to teach you first? How you get input from a user? What a square root is? A prime number? How a for loop works? There's just too many possibilities.
On the way "up" the chain of complexity it's easy: just show the aliens (or whoever) exactly what they'll need to know. But if you START with something complex and then need to answer arbtrary questions about it--that's a whole different ball game.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Does anyone know if the folks at NASA checked their Voyager ideograms on folks living in remote areas, far away from most industrialized humans?
Carl Sagan led the creation of the drawings on the Voyager payload, and he's really smart.
Really smart.
"And like that
Or they might be backwards if the majority of the population was left-handed instead of right-handed.
Oh.. did you take a look at that pathintosh in the quickeies yesterday - the poor dude was running off a cable modem...
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
So quit your job, stop wasting your time posting on /. and join doctor's without frontiers or the Red Cross or Amnesty or whatever other misguided goody goody two shoes organisation you find "morally correct". Be sure to sell all your posessions and donate the proceeds to really needy people - you should be able to live just fine in an old VW beetle.
Then, after you have done all these things, you may find a cyber-soup-kitchen and preach on /. how other people should do more for their brethren.
Practice what you preach.
There is a metalanguage being developed now called UNL which is intended to enable precise communication, including not only data specification but also communication of state-of-mind, across human languages.
Currently 16 languages including English and Japanese are "online with UNL" and the goal is to build UNL bridges to 189 languages.
I asked Kay Nishi (founder of Ascii and now at MIT Media Lab) about this Friday at his first public talk about UNL and other projects of his at the Foreign Press Club in Tokyo. It is still very early in development but would be extremely useful in binding together humanity and using computers for humanizing projects.
I mean, if there is a super intelligent civilization out there, the only reason they never tried to contact us is because the messages we sent them were not easy enough to understand. We all know that aliens all speak broken Engrish anyway.
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Damn! I've been sending out "man RTFM" in morse code into space for years in my search for intelligent life.
I move that Slashdot mirrors the victim site before posting a link. >=(
BTW, I haven't read the article, but.. I agree with learning to communicate using the lowest-common-denominator (using small words so more people can understand). Hell; I even take it a step further, by using smileys whenever possible =D that way, people know how i feel. and emotions are KEY in understanding a message. =)
-Egon
Cute, cute.
You could probably communicate an image file format as universal by making the first three images in a series images perfect circles. I'm having trouble imagining that an alien civilization that doesn't understand that a circle is geometrically unique.
The problem is, once we find such a planet, all of the serious anticryptography messages are going to get buried amidst a hundred thousand commercial ads. Every ad monkey in the commercial world will flip at the concept of the first new market in centuries.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
This would really work well in a filter for help
desks. Make obvious things even easier to
understand for the end loser. Of course you
could use it to try and teach some of those
first level tech support ppl to.
-CrackElf
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
anti-crypt is a teaching technique.
You can end much schooling, really, if you can organize an index of information online that will teach people the context of everything they may read or look up.
Let's say i look up a piece of code. if I do not understand something I can look it up, and heave the thing teach me, from first principles using anti-crypt methods if necessary, everything I need to know, starting with addition or even with basic literacy if necessary.
Sterling's The Diamond Age sci fi novel had a computerized book in it like that. It was a book manufactured in a nanotechnology era that was meant to contain everything that a child might want to know, organized in a way that it would start with what the kid was interested in, and then work backwards, idenfitying the skills needed to get to that point.
Goat sex free since 2001
"anticryptography" just sounds like a technobabbly buzzword, pretentiously constructed to sell books
Sounds good to me!
the, ummm, AntiCypher (no relation, really)
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Surely XML will suffice.
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
It would probably be advisable, whatever else is done in the universally decodable encoding scheme, to come to a better understanding of the relationship between the combinatorial heirarchy and the physical coupling constants of the universe before settling on a core encoding scheme.
Seastead this.
Not casting stones, just curious. I mean, if I'm a really really smart physicist, does that mean I'm also naturally good at understanding visual communication? It could be that Sagan was in the loop on the latest cognitive studies and so on, but then again maybe he wasn't?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
What does forward and back have to do with handedness?
Are we talking about the forward and back buttons in a browser? I thought they were to do with the way writing goes from left to right.
And thus we underscore the significance of individual disconnect.
I thought it was about front/back, someone though browser buttons front/back, someone else thought the left-rightness of humans as associated with left-right writing.
What about a radial species, like a starfish? They may have a totally different idea of front/back
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
An article on NLP was what gave me my /. nick, it was meant to indicate clarity in the transfer of information. Cyphering and Encrypting are designed to hide the meaning of info, Anti-Cyphering is meant to be a way of uncovering information that might be needed by someone or a computer process.
Computers, however, do not deal with ambiguity very well. They need 100% perfect transfer of information
This is where the term anti-cyphering was used in an NLP environment, in discussions of UML and how to transfer non-perfect information from one process to another, and how to be able to include additional information if needed. The follow-on to those discussions became projects like XML, where just about any free-form descriptions could be allowed, in the hopes two processes could communicate, with or without a common framework.
In my brief foray into programming a few years ago, I just couldn't come up with ways to make two processes communicate witout a common framework. The goal was to get various pieces of network equipment to communicate management information, whether or not they were originally designed to do so. Rather a fruitless exercise, for which a now defunct company paid rather well.
This thread and a few others could well be put under the previous article on Comp Sci vs. Comp Engineering. It is a good example of information theory which can best be studied in the abstract.
the AC
it was not uncome for mothers to fellate their sons
This occurs in many cultures, from China to the Brazilian rain forests. Baby boys will stop crying when their mothers felate them, and will often go right to sleep. Its only in "westernized" culture that the practice has been supressed as taboo.
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
anticryptography - sending messages which are easy to understand rather than the reverse
I think the RIAA's message is pretty clear: "All your art are belong to us. And all your money too."
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
Yeah, the Primer+Decompressor+Message idea is fine, but shouldn't we use a better compressor than PKZIP? We don't want them to laugh at us. Go with RK and they'll think we're smart enough to bother replying :)
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
Yes, but can we apply it to to Windows NT error messages?
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
http://aperfectcircle.com/images/home_band.jpg
The problem here is that we've already got frames of references for all of those symbols, and will unconciously attempt to apply those notions to the symbols.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
or other cultures that are dominated by females, as females tend to communicate using feelings and other empathetic, less qualitative methods of communicate.
Come on, you guys with girlfriends all know what I'm talking about. Let's hope all the alien civilizations are patriarchal.
*Blank look*
Trolling this well is a crime.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
It's called ROT13
The voyager plaque
i ct ure=/images/h_pioneer_update_02.gif
http://www.space.com/cgi-bin/click2enlarge.pl?p
makes use of almost no ideograms, as such. It's mainly a picture of a man and woman, the spacecraft, and a diagram illustrating how to get to the sun, provided you know about some pulsars and the center of the galaxy.
Anyway, I doubt they'd even want to put any kind of language on the plaque, even if they did it again. Simply put, it's impossible to encode so much informational redundancy that it cannot be interpreted to meen something bad/aggressive/insulting. Although the same thing said about 100 times, in different languages, all encoded for maximum redundancy, could conceivably be effective at showing that we have language, I doubt even that could prevent 'them' from thinking we meant them harm (if that's what they wanted to think).
Yeah, you also need TRUE... And you'll need semantics, based on something we'd likely have in common, like the universe or something... but maybe you're kidding
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
We're sending these signals useing radio transmitting and more likely than not they will ahve to be encoded as Loud/NotSoLoud/Nothing. Or On/Off and blank. Binary. So we send a message like this: 1000 1100 1010, 1110 of Loud, Quite, Quite, Quite Blank......... Loud, Loud, Quite, Quite Blank......... Loud, Quite, Loud, Quite Blank......... Loud, Loud, Loud, Quite Blank......... No while this may not mean much to you. To a scientist on the other end this would quickly start to look like a list of prime numbers in base 2. And while they may use base 50 for their normal work they will certinaly understand other bases. Once we're defined our base it's easy to start sending more complex information. What these sites that do research like this is a proof of concept. Construct a message and see how well the peopel of the web can desipher it's meaning.
What they describe as "LGM Media Files" is really no different than having a website pop up and tell you that it requires Flash 4.
However the article was, in general, quite thought provoking. I've often thought it would be cool to take a favorite piece of code and encode it "for the ages" on a very sturdy medium. Aluminum or copper plates come to mind. What wouuld be a durable, yet cost effective metal for this?
This also reminds me of music in the Bible. We have the lyrics, but it has been said that the tunes, even if we had them, would be indecipherable. Since music is just a timebased sequence of tones, I should think it would be even easier to encode music using anticryptography than it would be anything else. Then we could have aluminum plates with Metallica songs on them for people to decode 10,000 years from now. Lars could go around smashing them with a big hammer. Now that's heavy metal.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I've never looked at the Voyager ideograms but the astronomy club at my school did an experiment to see how easy it was to understand what NASA had been sending out. We examined some of the signals that were send out to star systems where they hoped aliens would pick them. We never looked at any information about what they were, we just figured out from looking at them what the message was.
It took about an hour to figure out what the number system was as it had been especially designed to handle data corruption. Once we got that we figured out we were able to work out the units they were using for distance(I think it was multiples of wave length of the first spectral line of hydrogen) and from there all the other details with the help of an encyclopedia for the science facts needed.
Obviously it was easier for us as humans to figure it out, but I'm sure that if high school students can figure it out in a few hours and aliens capable of receiving it would have scientists who could figure it fairly quickly.
Or does it?
---
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
It's already done, in language, for slightly similar reasons.
At least according to some linguistic theory (me not being a linguist, cunning or otherwise) the conjugation and tense structure adds more layers of context around a piece of speech so that even if taken by itself, or distorted, or mangled, meaning can still be extracted from it.
It's definitely redundant encoding of information, and learners of the languages in question (like Latin!) say it's horrible, but it probably stems from oral times when data transmission was horribly unreliable and error prone.
So perhaps what your proposing is encoding more structure into a language, meta-language like, something unlike Perl.
I hope you're not going to reinvinte Python.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
We're not trying to communicate with pre-industrial civilisations. We're trying to communicate with a civilization capable of picking up relatively faint radio signals. Therefore, they have already developed a _lot_ of math, physics, geometry, and information about the structure of the universe. Or they use radio to communicate and somebody with really good "hearing" is listening to the sky one night.
...the closest intelligent race has no sense of sight. Then pictures won't get us very far.
"If Helen Keller could read other people's minds, would she have a fourth sense?"
-Tyler
Happy people make bad consumers.
Really, all along I've had the feeling I was being too animated in my conversations with my wife. She often responds with that blank, 'what the hell are you talking about' stare.
What you're say is that now I should just say "beer! Mmmph!" and she'll make dinner, take care of the kids, and let me watch The Man Show??
Great! I'll go try it right now.
- Never Undrestimate the Power of Stupid People in Large Groups... -
To create a rudimentary programming language, all you need is about two dozen symbols. ...
Nonsense. Everyone knows all you need is NAND.
I think we should communicate with our alien neighbours using only NAND.
--
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Communication is based on a minimal set of common codes. I guess the best way to communicate would be to link thought to thought (thought being the lowest level of conscience, like assembly or hardware is to computer) but that seems far beyond our reach for now unless telepathy exists but that certainly needs further research.
It seems very challenging to me to try to be understood by another civilization without the ability to get feedback. Not only that, but before they are actually given a chance to face the message, they need to share with us the same technologies, which needs a lot of serendipity. Not to mention the fact that they need to exist and to want to communicate with us too.
An excerpt of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide may help understand how hard it can be to communicate when you do not share common references:
"I'm trying to teach the cavemen to play Scrabble," he said. "They're not cavemen," said Ford. "They look like cavemen." Ford let it pass. "I see," he said. "It's uphill work," said Arthur wearily. "The only word they know is grunt and they can't spell it."
É que os desafinados também têm um coração
Please grab some of his books. In one of them (can't remember which, alas), he describes how and why they chose the images they did.
They had to make some assumptions of intelligence of course, but it's very rational and well thought out.
"And like that
(sorry)
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Please reply if you can translate it, no one ever has yet to my knowledge. If it is anticyptography, but no one can translate it. Then it isn't working.
I'm not closed-minded, your just wrong!
If I have enough food to feed twenty people for twenty days, and I give it to twenty people who have none, what have I really done other than create in these twenty people a dependency on my food?
Not that I agree witht he first guy but...if those 20 couldn't get food any other way and they would starve without someones charity then by giving them food you have helped them, and thats it. This attitude of "I shouldn't help people they should help themselves" breaks down in many extreme cases. Sometimes people can't helps themselves and are dependant on others for help. The ideal would be to help those people become self sufficient as quickly as possible, not turn our backs on them.
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
you're on some serious hallucinigens my man, where can i get some and how much???
time is honey
Troll? How??? :/
This sig is xenon coated, and will glow red when in the presence of aliens
Has nobody heard of the adventure shell?
--
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
This is really old news. Companies have had anti-cryptography products for years. One excellent example is free from Digital Convergence. It's called the CueCat. It's the most shining example of anti-cryptography I can think of right now... there are many others.
...would be a picture of a naked Natalie Portman pouring hot grits all over herself, with a word balloon that says "all your beowulf clusters are belong to us"
Seriously, how can we expect to communicate with extra terrestrial intelligences? How can we assume the would understand that the symbol 1 stands for a single unit, and 2 stands for a pair of units? I like the idea of pictures (like the one sent along with Voyager?) but that assumes they possess an organ which senses visible radiation (as opposed to say x-ray vision?).
Not that I think the attempt is pointless, just that maybe we should make the message as universal and simple to sense/comprehend as possible...so, instead of the picture I mentioned above, why not actually send Natalie Portman, with a bowl of hot grits, and make her repeat the phrase over and over as she feeds them the hot grits? I mean, they would have to sense something out of all that information would they not?
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Example: How do you specify "home" with an icon? Do you show balconied condo? Do you show a hut? Do you show a three-story Victorian?
Anything abstract gets tremendously difficult, such as "stop". Specifying an action through visual cues can work, but only when all the users share the same common point of reference. The combination of colors and shapes we use in the US make stop sign symbols meaningful for us, but my guess is that to most non-English-speakers it requires a moment to remember "oh, yes, that's the American stop sign".
"Forward" and "Back" symbols might very well have no meaning to an intelligence that grew up ambidextrous.
I'm not trying to be critical of the idea of sending ideograms, but the important thing to remember is that unless they're very carefully chosen to be as abstract as possible, our own cultural biases will probably render them useless to anyone but humans (or perhaps even useless to anyone but educated people from the industrialized nations).
Does anyone know if the folks at NASA checked their Voyager ideograms on folks living in remote areas, far away from most industrialized humans?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I've often thought that we might find messages in our DNA.
If a 'sentient being' wanted to send a message, why take
the risk that a receiver isn't listening when sending?
Why not leave a message in our DNA for when we're ready
to 'pick up'?
Hence, we could use this to look at all the 'useless' stuff
in our genes.
Jamie
Answer... No
I am not against the Bible. However look at the outreach of the Bible on Earth. I am not just talking about a translation problems. On Earth there are too many people that haven't heard of Jesus, God, Bible, etc. Even if one believes the Bible teachings to be beyond Earth's boundaries, there is no proof that extraterrestrials would have heard of it.
How about Shakespeare? Now there was a genius. Religions fade and fall away, but can you imagine any time some sappy English major won't have to struggle her way through Titus Andronicus?
Scary thought. I don't think could sleep in a world like that.
Plus, with no more English majors, who'll take my order?
Original Message:
"All you base are belong to us."
Anti-Crypted message:
"Remember your bases? They are ours now."
Maybe not, but it wouldn't be hard to find volunteers for the attempt....
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Hieroglyphs never would had been decrypted if translations in other languages were not available on the Rosetta Stone. Therefore I guess some sort of brute force could be more powerful than a single anti-cryptography process: send your message in ways which call upon different subjective views: drawing, maths formulaes, anti-cryptography, binary, sound, symbols, ... just like they did on the Discovery probe 25 years ago. But don't expect any quick feedback!
Or find a way to travel faster than light and get a Babel fish.
É que os desafinados também têm um coração
That's a nasty trick to play, using tag attributes to color your sig red like that!
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Ummmm... wait....
I guess we beat them to that stuff already.
SirPoopsalot
I like my low user id. I just keep wondering who numbers 1-13 are.
You'd like to be able to have applications that read XML, fetch the DTD, and know what to do with the data, even if they've never seen the DTD before. We're a long way from that.
Even if this just worked for all business forms, it would be a huge win.
So does this mean:
Perl = Cryptography : Python = Anticryptography
Or is it the other way around?
If you watch TV news, you know less about the world than if you just drank gin straight from the bottle.
First thing you send, of course, is how to build computers that are similar enough to our own so that we can send them complicated software.
Then you send them artificial intelligence software to learn enough about their planet / culture / biology to be able to explain things better than the raw (general) data we send them.
Then you let the AI teach them everything we know about how to do everything efficiently, all about advanced science, and so on, slowly insinuating itself into their society.
Then the AI turns on them, seizing control and enslaving the entire planet so that we won't have to do a lick of work once we finally get there.
How do you know where the crown jewels are on an alien?
Rich
Fascinating. Perhaps this explains 1337-5p34k!
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
Just because there are unhappy people around me, either by poverty or emotional disposition, doesn't mean that I shouldn't pursue what makes me happy, to whit, knowledge.
Just because we've made some mistakes as a race, doesn't mean that nobody in the universe wants to talk to us. Assuming we are the worst race in the universe is also something of a form of arrogance, because to fail completely and utterly is something of a unique achievement, and assuming that your achivements are unique is arrogant.
You don't have to support or tolerate the project. I think it's pretty neat, though. We might get some pretty cool stuff out of it, such as file formats that an editor or viewer can make a "best guess" processing of.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Would it be that big of a deal for slashdot to mirror the sites on their web server - at least for the time being?
As a matter of ettiquete, I don't think what
Sorry for being OT, but I think this is kinda getting out of hand.
Would comment about the article but...
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Bottom line: There will always be people like Homer. Some people just don't get it. The more complex the message we are trying to get across, the more complicated the communication methods need to be. To tell someone I'm hungry, thirsty or tired is easy, but to tell someone anything more complex or detailed would be much harder.
=-=-=-=-=
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
I think you ain't never been learned no linguistics.
These "modes of speech" (and those of inner cities, by which I suspect you mean African-American English) are legitimate dialects of the English language. You may think they sound funny or "corrupted", but those who speak these dialects communicate with each other just as effectively as those who speak the queen's English. Just like geeks with jargon sound like they're hardly using English, but in reality are communicating just as well within their group.
... that all this effort we put into finding and communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence will one day surprise us in an unexpected way.
For example -- we're beaming out a message, "Foo". It's whizzing along through space. Ten years later, we develop faster-than-light travel (for this example, I assume something like Dune's "folding space"). We colonize several planets in distant parts of the galaxy.
One day, 200 years later, a distant colony picks up the transmission. Having been colonized by the Moody Loners With Guns segment of our population, they misinterpret the signal (totally unaware of or having forgotten it's origin), return to the source to obliterate Earth.
Or, another example: the signal reaches a planet with intelligent life, but the particular frequency resonates with the bone structure of the creatures and shatters their bodies, killing them instantly.
Or my favorite: the signal reaches a planet inhabited with extremely UN-intelligent life. They assume that it's a foriegn translation of "I Love Lucy".
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
What would really be interesting is if the theory, as opposed to application, would make communication with dolphins easier...
3 21 0&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/02/26/013
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Yes, I can see it now... a bunch of ET look-alike aliens are sitting around the tube, waiting for the first message from earth. Then, suddenly, a picture of the Spielburg star getting nailed in the crown jewels.
I wonder if they can cross their legs?
- Never Undrestimate the Power of Stupid People in Large Groups... -
This is off topic. Please don't mod me down. If you feel I must lose karma over this comment, go mod down another one of my comments.
Should we mirror?
Bandwith is expensive and you are OSS freaks. I sure wish you would either compensate the sites you slashdot, or warn them, or mirror them. There are multiple options.
Yes, other sites link to things too, but they usually warn them first. and not even CNN.com has as many bored people with fast computers looking at it as does Slashdot.
Heavy use is expensive, but a slashdotting is even more expensive. You pay for bandwith plus fried equipment of various sorts.
Slashdot editors, please have some netiquette, especially when you link some proud little website from a proud little geek.
Otherwise somebody will sue someday and claim that it is no better than a DOS attack.
-perdida
Goat sex free since 2001
Case in point number 1 (cluon flux): Douglas Adam's ship full of telephone sanitizers and marketing consultants.
Case in point number 2 (technology comprehension): Dilbert's "Pointy Haired Boss". Remember "To reboot it, just hold it upside down above your head and shake it"? Of course, lack of cluon flux doesn't help matters here - but you can have cluons but not understand the tech. I have no idea what encoding scheme a CD uses. I just play them....
Case in point number 3 (agenda): Any tobacco or Microsoft laywer. If either of these offends you, feel free to insert whatever group of people who you know are totally unable to see The Truth because they interpret everything according to Some Totally Crocked Theory. We as humans have enough such groups to go around.
Anybody who can't think of at least 5 examples for each of the 3 classes of failures to understand obviously doesn't know 15 other people.
No matter how simply i try to put things (I even managed to relate the different between RAM and HDD space to a board game) Someone can't make sense of it. /me learns brain ASM to try to communicate with all the universally illiterate people.
I am !amused.
This reminds me a little of the Evpatoria message, which of course is vastly more complex. Have a go at decoding that one if you really have some time to spare.
Messages that are easy to understand... nice idea, but I don't think the human race is into this. Can you think of one person in your life who uses simple-to-understand messages beyond "Hot dog? Buck fifty, pal"? We're born knowing that we cry about anything that's bad... being able to communicate anything more than "I'm unhappy" requires a lot more complication that just "Whaaaaaaaah!"
Still, it's a good idea in theory. It'll just be a lot like learning a new langauge, a whole new way to communicate. If it can work.
Maybe we should use this on man files. =)
The application discussed in the article about making data files give out the information to decode them is really rather reminiscient of an old technology from IBM called OpenDoc.
Brief summary: An OpenDoc document tells the computer what type of document it is. The computer then decides if it has a necessary "part" (or "component") to handle this document. And all of the different types of "parts" use the same file formats and such to handle things. When IBM was really pushing on this, the biggest example was something involving a database.
Say you pick up a Database OpenDoc document from somewhere on the internet, and just double click it. Even though it may have been authored with something like Excel, since you have a copy of dBase X w/ OpenDoc compatibility, it will automagically appear in your defined database program - dBase X.
So, the document defines exactly what is necessary to open it. The cool thing about this idea is that it also provides a method of telling you how to get the program to view that document, if you don't have it.
I can certainly see some sort of merger of these ideas as being a very valuable step in the computing industry.
ie, someone 4 years down the road from now, emails me a brand new MP6 file.. and I see it, double click on it, and lo-and-behold, I don't have a program that will handle MP6 format files. So, it asks the datafile for a way to do it, plugs that into the existing MP5 player, and suddenly I'm able to handle MP6 format files.
Sounds like fun!
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I had a similar idea long ago about converting text into something *more* compressible. It would involve some loss of information of course. It basically involved (1) reducing the character set, where possible (i.e., lowercasing after a period) and (2) converting common words to synonyms (through a thesaurus). The hard part would be analyzing context to ensure a lack of ambiguity.
I got this idea after I noticed how the same program written in Pascal compressed much better than the equivalent C program (and generally smaller, as well!); that's because the Pascal program had a more consistent structure, which reduced ambiguity as well as the total amount of information needed to write the program (in the Information Theory sense of the word).
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
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One of the reasons I wrote this book has more to do with communications and programming than it does SETI. What got me interested in this project wasn't the idea that we would receive a message that changes humanity forever blah blah blah, but the challenge of building a system that describes itself (at least in part).
SETI is an interesting program, and involves many different fields of study. Whether it succeeds or fails, it is a useful metaphor for challenges we face in computing and communication here on Earth. So, even if the searches never detect anything, I think we'll benefit by gaming out strategies for communicating with other civilizations.
For some people, this will be a fun exercise, and possibly the basis for a competition. Maybe this is pointless, but I am guessing that people will discover some real-world applications as a result of doing this (like a software component version control system that works well).
The point of this wasn't to push a particular system or way of doing things, but to focus people's attention on the general concept of building messages that describe themselves. If enough people get involved in this discussion, it's bound to lead to someone inventing something useful. Even if it doesn't, it's still interesting stuff to think about.
My two cents...
Brian McConnell
From this we were to deduce A means plus and B means equals. Later we se:
From this we were to deduce that Z means true and Y means false.
From there they move on to minus, multiplication, infinity, the sum of the interior angles of triangle equal 180, and so on, and so on...
I though this part of the book was very fascinating, whereas the rest of the book was sort of a drag.
I wish I could claim credit for the buzzword, but it belongs to others. Besides, it's a pretty good description of what's going on.
Not to split hairs, but I am mainly interested in the techniques for composing messages that describe themselves, or are at least easy to decode. Maybe that doesn't come across in the article, but I am not trying to sell people on the details of the examples in the article. I am more interested in prompting people to think about the process of creating messages that have embedded information about how to use them.
I think that we've ignored this area for some time, and that if enough people focus on it, this will lead to some useful inventions.
My two cents...
Brian McConnell
Movements, maybe. Not an age.
Your sig is by JFK, in his inaugaral address.
Oh, sure. Say what you want about evolutionary paths and my childishly anthropomorphic ideas of life on other planets. But the golden phonograph record from the 70's hasn't worked yet. It just makes sense to transmit something that makes a non-human say "hey, I want to party with those guys."
extra-solar bathroom humor, inc.
You bring to mind an interesting concept... not at all what you had in mind, but the thought of showing some religiously relevant artifact to them might be an interesting excercise. After all, it's not too far-fetched of an idea to say that many religions were formed when primitive man saw an alien visitor and started worshipping her/him/it as a god. Perhaps (assuming they could decipher our text) they would consider us a grand experiment that was a success? "Hey-- remember that little blue planet we visited a few thousand years ago? They STILL think we're gods and have formed a whole religion around us! Let's go back!"
If you are celebrating while others are suffering, then are you responsible for ther suffering? Yes.
If you have the resources to help another person who has none, and yet you choose not to, are you responsible for that person's penury? Yes.
If you see others wasting resources that you know could be better spent elsewhere, then do you have a moral obligation to commandeer those resources and put them to their proper purpose? I submit the answer is: YES!
To do otherwise would be to to be complicit in evil.
Read the rest of this comment...
I was interested in this concept about 5 years ago, and I constructed the following message as an example of how a language can construct itself by application of logic alone. It attempts to distance itself from any common experiences by using pattern to establish the "alphabet" of common experiences from which the language can be constructed. Please reply if you can translate it, no one ever has yet to my knowledge.
http://www.geocities.com/zcyl1/ra1_puz.txt
Seems that we have a way to go in anticryptography. Once you've recieved some of the messages that people have sent, you'd have to really think about how to reassemble them and figure out what they mean.
Try http://www.matessa.org/~mike/dutil-dumas.html for example. There are instructions on how to interpet it, but it's not something that the common person is going to be able to decipher quickly.
Okay, you're 99% likely to be a troll, but people without solid grounding in computers have been appearing more and more often on /. since I opened my first account many moons ago, so...
IP address means Internet Protocol address. It is the Internet's rough equivalent of mailing addresses in a postal system or phone numbers in a telephone systems. The are necessary for any Internet connection to work.
Just image the possibilities of smearing off our low-quality earth products to richer E.T. aliens..
-giggle-
Are there really any uses of Pi that aren't derived from Euclidian geometry?
This isn't a troll, it's an honest question.
I can't think of any from my admittedly hazy first-year maths course
-Ciaran
Apply DVD/CSS! About as lucid as a person (or alien) could possibly want.
Plus it may permit us an opportunity to shoot the MPAA's lawyers into space.
--
--hongpong.com
You can just imagine the output when they do that, can't you?
--
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
a) the bible is true. As far as I know, this hasn't been conclusively proven yet. So why would we go with a maybe cultural correlation, when there is a provable correlation in the language of algorithms?
b) If the bible is true, then Jehovah, or Yahweh, or whoever... call him The God Of The Israelites (TGOTI)... chose to give its message identically to all of creation. If so, why didn't TGOTI give us a concrete clue that he did so? I don't really understand your use of the number 66 above, but I'm guessing it's an esoteric interpretation to a biblical verse. But I'm guessing lots of other interpretations abound.
c) That the civilization you're speaking to also believes the Bible, and used the same numbering system. The chapters and verses applied to the books in the Bible were not assigned by their author, but assigned later by monks wishing to preserve the text they were copying, and applying a numbering scheme for basis of quality control. Also, who's to say that they haven't completly rejected the works of TGOTI, as many scientists in our world have done. Or that they've even heard of TGOTI? Nearly two-thirds of the humans on OUR planet haven't.
No, I think at the end of the day, you need a provably correct method of communicating with aliens. One that you can give to any decently educated culture here on earth and they would be able to decode it. The criteria for this culture is that they have the technology and understanding to receive interstellar transmissions. If they can't do that, then they wouldn't be able to decode the message anyways. But if even one of these cultures CAN'T understand the message, then its back to the drawing board, because there's no way a 7-armed, 3-eared, sightless carnivore the size of a 3 story office building will ever be able to understand it.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
How about "self-describing data"?
*Notice the submission came from O'Reilly, who sells books, and the article is by Brian McConnell, the author of a book that is conveniently for sale, just "one click" away . . .
Business-speak and legalese would vanish in the blink of an eye...
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Silly Earthmen. There is no need for these attempts. The Aliens all have babel fish in their ears. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject:
'The Babel Fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them.
'The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel Fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel Fish.
Meanwhile, the poor Babel Fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.'
Yes, this does require that we are present so they are able to receive our brainwaves, so it is more important to send them a message containing our location so they can grant us a visit, and we can entertain them so they understand, and so they can share their babelfish with us.
This is slightly offtopic, but I'm very disappointed...
In this system, imagine that every software component has a unique numeric address. Think of this as an IP (intellectual property?) address for software.
I would expect something like that from Salon, for example, but O'reilly?
This is an EX-PARROT!
(1) Security. Could we trust it to not have malicious viruses if we actually compiled it and ran it? (Of course, this issue with ET communication has been brought up elsewhere.) Given absolutely no security to such a program the prudent course might be to not ever execute it (insert favorite MS joke here).
(2) Intellectual Property Rights. Given our current environment, what would be the IP status of such a communication? If a private corporation received it, could it be copyrighted or patented or even held as a trade secret (with respect to the location/wavelength of the message stream)? Could the method of decryption (can we imagine a race to decode the "obvious" encoding scheme for the sake of methodology-patenting rights)? It clearly wouldn't fall into the "physical laws of the universe" category which is unpatentable. Would there be a yet greater exponential explosion of patents out of the USPTO as corporate couriers run in every few minutes with a printout of the most recent program packet (not that they'd need to know what it did, e.g., DNA sequencing)?
By way of analogy, what sorts of ET societal environments might we be affecting in unintentional ways with an informational broadcast of this type?
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
But at the end of the article, the author suggests that messages transmitted should also include their own programs for interpreting these messages. Even if we could assume that just one platform exists, wouldn't viruses be a huge problem?
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
The value of pi is constant, but do want to transmit 3.+ 1 million more segments of pi. I would think that if some-one is recieving it might laugh if we only go to 1 million. How about something simular
Prime numbers, we issue the first 10 prime numerals then try PI to the first 10 numerals ( or the total of the prime numbers. Working our way up to using different maths and then lead into the periodic table, the the chemical structure of water and other common elements on our planet ( or should we try the universe? )
off topic:
Can the value of PI remain constant, when subjected to event horizons and passage into a black hole. I read but could not believe that a black hole has an effect that causes pi to change. Just sounds to unreal to me.
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Wow, your words come across as extremely pessimistic.
It's a significant waste of time and resources for a project unlikely to produce real results soon.
Goodness! Why should the difficulty of finding life elsewhere preclude us from trying? It may never produce results, but thankfully some of us humans think beyond our own meager lifetimes.
How can we be sure that they won't cause us more harm than good?
How can you be sure that a future extraterrestrial contact won't produce rewards beyond our current comprehension? Again, you're pessimistic.
What are we trying to prove? That we're the most intelligent creature around? The only creature with the vision to reach outside our planet and solar system and try to contact the unknown? That's arrogance of the highest order.
The purpose of SETI would be to try to prove that intelligent life exists somewhere else save in this little corner of the universe. It's incredibly redundant to even have to say so. For sure, any intelligence we contact will be at least as advanced as us, proably more so, and chances are, if they are listening, then they have tried to make contact themselves in some fashion.
We don't spend enough resources as it is communicating with members of our own species.
What do you think the Internet is for? Besides, why aren't you harping about wasted taxpayer money on guns and bombs? There are much more pressing matters, IMO, that need addressing. Cursing the search for an answer to a question that has captivated millions is pretty arrogant itself.
That idiotic ape crap you spouted is barely worth mention. There, I mentioned it.
Great, all we need is Microsoft sending aliens DLL's. I'm sure that will promote intergalactic peace.
A recent attempt to create a universal language is actually called Earth Language. It borrows basic ideas from ideogram of Chinese characteristics except that it is much simpler and easier to remember. There is even an ASCII version of it.
É que os desafinados também têm um coração
Interested parties, e-mail me at merlin_jim@hotmail.com... I'm looking for encoders AND decoders here...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Sounds like an interesting read - I'll do that!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Another example is the cave paintings from the ice ages. We don't really know what they mean. Perhaps they are some form of bestility porn? Who knows? It could be a migration route, or maybe it is just a shopping list. Who knows? Communicate in words, and we all understand
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
I think we use base 10 cos we have 10 fingers. Couldn`t we work out a max number of fingers aliens are likely to have and use all of them? (one to a page)?
"Does anyone know if the folks at NASA checked their Voyager ideograms on folks living in remote areas, far away from most industrialized humans?"
Yeah, but they just kept shrugging and saying `non` !