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.

Comments

Decoding script and decoded file.

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

Since slashdot will lameness filter out the asterisks in it, heres a perl script to decode it (sorry about the crap code):

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
my($out) = "";
while()
{
chop;
s/1/*/g;
s/0/\ /g;
$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