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.

Ok,

[wunderhorn1]

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

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?