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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."
Rich
ET Message, loud and clear:
Hello gentlemen!!!
All your base are belong to us.
(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)
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
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
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
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
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
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
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.
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.
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.
Rich
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
... 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.
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
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.
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. =)
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
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
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.
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
Just image the possibilities of smearing off our low-quality earth products to richer E.T. aliens..
-giggle-
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 . . .
Great, all we need is Microsoft sending aliens DLL's. I'm sure that will promote intergalactic peace.
Sounds like an interesting read - I'll do that!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ