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.

Comments

Other uses

[perdida]

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.

The Combinatorial Heirarchy

[Baldrson]

There is a very simple mathematical structure called the combinatorial heirarchy that somehow manages to do a better job of predicting the values of physical coupling constants than any physical theories to date. Pierre Noyes of Stanford University has been studying these constants and their relationship to the combinatorial heirarchy for many years. He's constructed something he calls "bit string physics" to attempt to make sense of this strange unity between basic mathematics of combination and these fundamental constants of physics.

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.

Ok,

[wunderhorn1]

Yes, but can we apply it to to Windows NT error messages?

Yes, yes I do

[iceyone]

http://aperfectcircle.com/images/home_band.jpg

Re:Interesting...

[2nd Post!]

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!

Re:pictures are the key - but even then...

[Infonaut]

Look at how difficult it is to apply icons here on earth.

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?

ask slashdot: Mirroring?

[perdida]

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

Interesting...

[Will The Real Bruce]

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).

Re:pictures are the key

[alkali]

An excellent idea. Anyone got a pointer to a digital image of a perfect circle?