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Search for Terrestrial Intelligence

Posted by michael on from the thinking-cap dept.

joshv writes: "Scientists have prepared a new message to be beamed out to the stars. Unlike the messages of the past this one tries to include some basic resistance to the noise that might be introduced in transit. The CETI project page contains a link to the new message. It a big bag of 0's and 1's. About 10% noise has been added. Can you crack the code? Details of the project as well as an interview with the one of the creators of the new message can be found in this New Scientist article. A hint to decoding: think simple raster based images and remember your powers of 2." Might want to get your copy of Beyond Contact or at least look at the first message they sent.

6 of 342 comments (clear)

  1. Nebula-nominated short story by CaptainCarrot · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's by Terry Bisson. He's aware that it's circulating the Internet unattrubuted, but fortunately it seems he doesn't have a problem with it.

    --
    And the brethren went away edified.
  2. The 'decoded' image. by Jade+E.+2 · · Score: 5, Informative
    There isn't any actual 'code' in this, it's just an on/off raster image just like all the other message we send out. The first 69 bytes (?!) appear to be noise. If you cut those off, remove all the line feeds, then wrap every 127 bytes, then replace all the 1s with 0xFF, 0s with 0x00, load it into Photoshop as a 127x2148 RAW image file, enlarge it to 400% for readability, and save it as a GIF, you end up with this: http://www.perlstorm.net/message.gif

    Of course, making sense out of the resulting image could take a while. At the top they're counting in binary, and seem to be assigning an arbitrary symbol for each number. The symbols seem to have been chosen in an attempt to make them out even when partially garbled. Those symbols and certain pictures are then used throughout the rest of the image. Heh, and check out the naked ppl!

  3. Re:Decoding script and decoded file. by herbyderby · · Score: 5, Informative
    The top part of the first page comes at the bottom of the message, probably to simulate catching the message partway through a loop.

    Here is the message as a monochrome png.

    --Chris

  4. Re:Decoding script and decoded file. by herbyderby · · Score: 4, Informative
    FYI, after realigning the message text you can generate a png yourself by prepending
    P1
    127 2149
    to the top of the message, and running the command:
    pbmtopgm 1 1 output_stream.txt | pgmtoppm white | ppmtogif | gif2png -fO > msg.png

    --Chris

  5. Re:What will SETI@Home make of it? by oni · · Score: 3, Informative

    SETI's automated systems make no attempt to find a message, they are looking for a signal. Note the difference: a signal is an EM spike - a message is the information that spike contains. But to answer your question, if you broadcast this message on frequencies that are commonly used by celestial objects then no, SETI probably wouldn't pick it out. If on the other hand, you used a dish as powerful as arecibo to broadcast it at the frequency of say pi*H then yeah, I think some buzzers would go off.

  6. Decoder Big Improvement by 2buck · · Score: 2, Informative

    Still not great but I think you'll be impressed. Click a "Glyph" (5x7 or 5x7 pixels) and it tries to figure it out. If it can't, you can add to it. But once you close you browser, your changes go away. http://newmanservices.com/seti/