Slashdot Mirror
Search for Terrestrial Intelligence
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.
Sheeeesh, why don't they make it more obvious, not something that has to be "cracked"?
:-), and then raster images of what they want to communicate, repeating over and over.
:-)
/. because of that?)
Like a regular sequence of on/off that just can't be missed (your "start bits" that get noticed
"Hey, look at this regular pattern of signal! That's weird. And it's interspersed with these garbage; if we just kind of line it up in rows, look, images!" (Assuming the concept of images means anything to whatever intelligence comes across it
(Of course, I might be way off base, as I didn't read the article. Will I get kicked off
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Can we get a program to see the output in SETI@home? Maybe it'll at least give us a hint as to the encoded message.
As a warm-up, consider the following computer program: Create an array of agents ("the world"), with 50% probability it contains 10 elements and with 50% probability it contains 100 elements. If an agent knows nothing about the world except the rules, for all it knows there is a 50/50 chance that there are only 10 agents in the world. On the other hand, if it knows that it lives in slot #33, it can conclude that there are 100 agents alive. Now for the twist. If it knows that it lives in, say, slot #9, there is not still a 50/50 chance. Instead the probability is 90% that there only are 10 agents because of observational bias. It is so improbable that the agent should find itself among the 10 first if there really were 100 slots that this strengthens the probability of just 10 agents (write the program and let the agents evolve their guesses through genetic algorithms or something, if you don't believe me). Furthermore if we improve the experiment and let the array be of random size, than the best guess for a smart agent would be that he lives in the last slot or in any case that it is very unlikely that the array is, say, a factor 10 more than its slot number. How does this map to reality? Well, you and I know which slot in time that we inhabit (actually the time is not as important as our birth-number). Based on the same argument it is very unlikely that our race will survive for much longer. If we imagine that we will able to colonize planets sometime in the future, and thus increase our numbers even more, it makes the odds even worse.
On to the aliens. For the argument above to be fair, we cannot just make an arbitrary division and count the number of humans. We must count everyone/thing that can somehow reason about this issue. Using the exact same argument, we can note that if there is, somewhere in space-time, a race that spans a large amount of stars (i.e with vast technical superiority compared to ours), it is extremely unlikely that you and I would not be one of them.
The only escape from the logic of the above arguments is, as I see it, either:
1. In the future we will become like the Borg, one hivemind and thus the actual number of people does not matter, since that one mind does not affect the statistics.
2. In the future we will evolve to something very strange, which will be uncapable of posing these questions.
By the way... A little something to make your heads spin even more ;). The above argument also applies to your age. I'll let you figure out the consequences of that one for yourselves... This is not just some crackpot theory of mine, the people who support this theory is an impressive bunch (Hawking, Tipler, Barrow, Davies, etc).
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Since slashdot will lameness filter out the asterisks in it, heres a perl script to decode it (sorry about the crap code):
/g;
:-(
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
my($out) = "";
while()
{
chop;
s/1/*/g;
s/0/\
$out = $out . $_;
}
# Remove first 69
$out = substr($out,69);
$rowlength = 127;
my($nextrow) = "";
do
{
$nextrow = substr $out, 0, $rowlength;
print $nextrow . "\n";
$out = substr $out, $rowlength;
}
while($out ne "");
exit;
The output wont go through lameness filter
But its here anyway.
Mr Thinly Sliced
I still think the most interesting approach to extraterrestrial exploration is to use a fleet of autonomous probes. One such design I'm most partial to is a simple payload cylinder with a solar-sail affixed. If the sail is physical, then build in some radiation shielding. If it's electromagnetic as some physicists have suggested, then your shielding may be unnecessary. Inside, the payload consists of a rack of fertilized cells in stasis, and variously encoded data about our society. Use a long-term radiothermal battery to power it, and launch as many off as we can, in various directions. Make it strong enough to survive the ages and eventually, assuming there is other intelligent life out there, one will eventually be encountered. Furthermore, if we include our own cells, these things could serve as modern day arks. Build them using old missile chassis and we've killed three birds with one stone.
Pax Digitalia
Well, actually, right now there's also '\n's.
Which actually gives us a hint on where to start with decoding: there's an obvious pattern, however, the length chosen for the lines is not identical to the pattern.
In other words, first thing to do is rearranging the line lenghts to match the pattern.
If I take the random piece:
00001000000001100000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000110000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000011000000000000110011
00100010001001010010001000100000001010000
00000000000011000100110000001000000101001
00100001000100001100000000100000000000011
00010000000001010010010101010010000001100
I would rearrange it as:
00001000000001100000000000000000000000000*
00000000000001100000000000000000000000000*
00000000000001100000000000011001100100010*
00001100000000100000000000011000100000000*
(*end of line cut due to lameness filter)
The noise is obvious from the fourth line. It becomes a bit trick if you get noise in the time-domain, but still nothing to complex. It certainly looks like they use a fixed 'word' length.
they used Buckminster Fuller's map. he made the first (and only, i belive) map to show the earth without any distortion of the continents.
its all cut up and the things are in odd places, but thats cool that they used his map.
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
About 10% noise has been added.
Except this appears to be in the form of removing 1s and replacing them by 0s only. If every 1 in 10 characters were inverted that would be more representative, but I don't really understand why they think that adding the noise demonstrates anything.
In practice this message should be broadcast repeatedly, eventually by averaging you should be able to remove most of the noise.
Frankly, I find the whole thing overly complex and obscure, as others have stated. If we have such a problem understanding it, what chance have any non-human intelligences? They are almost certainly to be totally unlike us, alien to be exact.
Actually it is rocket science...