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Programming IT Technology

Anticryptography 163

Posted by michael from the remove-this-to-email-earth dept.
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.
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Anticryptography

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  • The article begins: "Ever since Mosaic, the computer industry has been obsessed with cryptography.".

    Uh-huh. That long. Wow.

    Does someone want to tell these guys about World War II?

    Ah, heck [time.com].

    --Blair
    "Next week: How to Patent Chisambop."
  • Uhh, it's obvious YOU didn't read the article.

    That was my point...the (Intellectual property?) thing was THEIRS, not mine.

  • I ran an ad on a cab.

    All your event [openschedule.org] are belong to us.
  • In the adventure video game Rama [netscape.com], based off of Arthur C. Clarke's books, you had to learn some alien languages composed of different symbols. The game allowed you to play with an alien octal calculator, then offered some problems to see if you understood the symbols and the math.
  • Yes, if you are only using 8 or 10 digit numbers. You are going to transmit quite a few digits of Pi, likely enough to see that only the symbols 0-9 are used. Or perhaps you would transmit it in binary, only using 0 and 1. You might even transmit it in several different bases.

    Rich


  • This article has a lot more to offer the computing world than it does the SETI world. It proposes a way of distributing code and applications that could, in one quick stroke, get rid of all the damn library-dependency issues that are continually cropping up.

    This is a great idea for an operating system / library environment!

    Someone should convince sourceforge to start handing out universal version numbers with each project. A unique number could identify the project, then the developer could add a number to identify what platform it runs on and a few more digits to give it versioning information. Then, an RPM-like package manager could be queried by the software at run-time to ensure that all the packages that are needed are present. When not found the software can query the user until an automated and secure distribution scheme can be developed.

    In this way, an incremental step could be made toward a system that completely describes itself. Now all we need is someone with sufficient clout to take up this behemoth of a project - or lend their support to it anyway. Linus, where are you?! :)

    Rudy Moore
  • It is unfortunate how there is no completely universal language (no, music doesn't count).

    Several bases might work. Except, that could also confuse. Less similarity amongst the statements.

    Binary could work but there are a few catches. Do they interpret binary numbers left to right or right to left? Are they read right to left in 4 byte chunks, and then left to right for the next 4? Do they use trits instead (0, 1, and 2)?
  • # declarations
    Use lang.math.sine[100.1.2.3] as sine
    Use graphics.2d.drawline[95.2.1.1] as drawline
    Use lang.math.pi[100.1.2.1] as pi

    The component system does seem like a good idea, but it's actually almost what we've got now. In Perl, if you're missing a module you can usually grab it off CPAN if it's a popular one - that could be automated. You could even introduce more general language extensions to help:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    use strict;
    use HTML::Parse available at http://www.somesite.com/perl/htmlparse/;
    use Math::FuzzyLogic available at ftp://www.maththings.org/pub/math/fuzzylogic/;
    use Popular::Module available via CPAN;

    Each directory pointed to by an 'at' could house a .tar.gz, an .rpm, a .deb, etc., with an index thereof. The 'via' keyword could signal archives such as CPAN for which a more elaborate system is engaged.

    Later you could add version control:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    use strict;
    use HTML::Parse available at 'http://www.somesite.com/perl/htmlparse/', need 5.0;
    use Math::FuzzyLogic available at 'ftp://www.maththings.org/pub/math/fuzzylogic/', need 4.1.7+;
    use Popular::Module available via 'CPAN', need 1.2+;

  • ET Message, loud and clear:
    Hello gentlemen!!!
    All your base are belong to us.
  • ...please apply this concept to Calculus textbooks post-haste! I'm dyin' here!!

  • what base do you presume using to transmit these numerals? Remember, whichever one you pick means making an assumption about how many fingers/arms/tentacles the receiving species will have.

    You don't need any base to transmit prime numbers. Just transmit 2 pulses, then 3, then 5, then 7, then 11. 11 pulses is still the same number of pulses if you represent it as 11(base 10), B(base 12-infinity), or 1011(base 2).

    Pi would have to be represented in some base, unless there is some way to represent irrational numbers as discrete pulses or something. However, I think the problem could be solved by sending it in several bases. The ones I would suggest would be 2 and 12. 2 because the third law of logic makes it a desireable base to do logical type things in, and 12 because using 12 as a base makes numbers much easier to factor. These are the two most logical bases to use IMO. You could also include derivative bases such as 16, or 60 if you feel it is necessary for clarification.

  • But do you need an anti-GnuPG to encode it?

    (And can a GnuPG and anti-GnuPG exist on the same drive, without converting into raw bits?)

  • I was going to post something about how not even Stephenson thought of this first, but then another thought occurred to me. This may not work very well. Here's what triggered that thought:

    "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."

    EVERYTHING? Consider a simple piece of (psuedo) code:

    Get X from user
    For i = 2 to sqrt(x) do
    if x mod i = 0
    print "composite"
    end
    print "prime"
    end

    Let's say you didn't understand this. What's the primer going to teach you first? How you get input from a user? What a square root is? A prime number? How a for loop works? There's just too many possibilities.

    On the way "up" the chain of complexity it's easy: just show the aliens (or whoever) exactly what they'll need to know. But if you START with something complex and then need to answer arbtrary questions about it--that's a whole different ball game.
    --
    Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
  • Does anyone know if the folks at NASA checked their Voyager ideograms on folks living in remote areas, far away from most industrialized humans?

    Carl Sagan led the creation of the drawings on the Voyager payload, and he's really smart.

    Really smart.
  • "Forward" and "Back" symbols might very well have no meaning to an intelligence that grew up ambidextrous.

    Or they might be backwards if the majority of the population was left-handed instead of right-handed.

  • cool, at least one person agrees with me.
    Oh.. did you take a look at that pathintosh in the quickeies yesterday - the poor dude was running off a cable modem...

    I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.

  • So quit your job, stop wasting your time posting on /. and join doctor's without frontiers or the Red Cross or Amnesty or whatever other misguided goody goody two shoes organisation you find "morally correct". Be sure to sell all your posessions and donate the proceeds to really needy people - you should be able to live just fine in an old VW beetle. Then, after you have done all these things, you may find a cyber-soup-kitchen and preach on /. how other people should do more for their brethren. Practice what you preach.

  • UNL (Score:1)

    by mattr ( 78516 )
    There is a metalanguage being developed now called UNL which is intended to enable precise communication, including not only data specification but also communication of state-of-mind, across human languages.

    Currently 16 languages including English and Japanese are "online with UNL" and the goal is to build UNL bridges to 189 languages.

    I asked Kay Nishi (founder of Ascii and now at MIT Media Lab) about this Friday at his first public talk about UNL and other projects of his at the Foreign Press Club in Tokyo. It is still very early in development but would be extremely useful in binding together humanity and using computers for humanizing projects.
  • I mean, if there is a super intelligent civilization out there, the only reason they never tried to contact us is because the messages we sent them were not easy enough to understand. We all know that aliens all speak broken Engrish anyway.

    --

  • RTFM (Score:1)

    by Zeus72 ( 228822 )
    Damn! I've been sending out "man RTFM" in morse code into space for years in my search for intelligent life.
  • I move that Slashdot mirrors the victim site before posting a link. >=(

    BTW, I haven't read the article, but.. I agree with learning to communicate using the lowest-common-denominator (using small words so more people can understand). Hell; I even take it a step further, by using smileys whenever possible =D that way, people know how i feel. and emotions are KEY in understanding a message. =)

    -Egon

  • Cute, cute.

    You could probably communicate an image file format as universal by making the first three images in a series images perfect circles. I'm having trouble imagining that an alien civilization that doesn't understand that a circle is geometrically unique.

    The problem is, once we find such a planet, all of the serious anticryptography messages are going to get buried amidst a hundred thousand commercial ads. Every ad monkey in the commercial world will flip at the concept of the first new market in centuries.

  • This would really work well in a filter for help
    desks. Make obvious things even easier to
    understand for the end loser. Of course you
    could use it to try and teach some of those
    first level tech support ppl to.

    -CrackElf

  • Other uses (Score:4)

    by perdida ( 251676 ) <thethreatprojectNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Tuesday February 27, 2001 @12:03PM (#397333) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • "anticryptography" just sounds like a technobabbly buzzword, pretentiously constructed to sell books

    Sounds good to me!

    the, ummm, AntiCypher (no relation, really)
  • Surely XML will suffice.
    --

  • The Combinatorial Heirarchy (Score:3)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2001 @04:23PM (#397336) Homepage Journal
    There is a very simple mathematical structure called the combinatorial heirarchy [demon.co.uk] that somehow manages to do a better job of predicting the values of physical coupling constants than any physical theories to date [stanford.edu]. Pierre Noyes of Stanford University [stanford.edu] 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.

  • Interesting. Sagan is smart, no doubt. But is that really his area of domain expertise?

    Not casting stones, just curious. I mean, if I'm a really really smart physicist, does that mean I'm also naturally good at understanding visual communication? It could be that Sagan was in the loop on the latest cognitive studies and so on, but then again maybe he wasn't?

  • What does forward and back have to do with handedness?

    Are we talking about the forward and back buttons in a browser? I thought they were to do with the way writing goes from left to right.
  • And thus we underscore the significance of individual disconnect.

    I thought it was about front/back, someone though browser buttons front/back, someone else thought the left-rightness of humans as associated with left-right writing.

    What about a radial species, like a starfish? They may have a totally different idea of front/back

    Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
  • An article on NLP was what gave me my /. nick, it was meant to indicate clarity in the transfer of information. Cyphering and Encrypting are designed to hide the meaning of info, Anti-Cyphering is meant to be a way of uncovering information that might be needed by someone or a computer process.

    Computers, however, do not deal with ambiguity very well. They need 100% perfect transfer of information

    This is where the term anti-cyphering was used in an NLP environment, in discussions of UML and how to transfer non-perfect information from one process to another, and how to be able to include additional information if needed. The follow-on to those discussions became projects like XML, where just about any free-form descriptions could be allowed, in the hopes two processes could communicate, with or without a common framework.

    In my brief foray into programming a few years ago, I just couldn't come up with ways to make two processes communicate witout a common framework. The goal was to get various pieces of network equipment to communicate management information, whether or not they were originally designed to do so. Rather a fruitless exercise, for which a now defunct company paid rather well.

    This thread and a few others could well be put under the previous article [slashdot.org] on Comp Sci vs. Comp Engineering. It is a good example of information theory which can best be studied in the abstract.

    the AC

    it was not uncome for mothers to fellate their sons
    This occurs in many cultures, from China to the Brazilian rain forests. Baby boys will stop crying when their mothers felate them, and will often go right to sleep. Its only in "westernized" culture that the practice has been supressed as taboo.

  • anticryptography - sending messages which are easy to understand rather than the reverse

    I think the RIAA's message is pretty clear: "All your art are belong to us. And all your money too."

  • Pictures are easier to understand than words. That's why they used as many pictures as possible on deep space probes. ALthough, some topics might be difficult to express in pictures - a notable example being "FIRST POST" What do you think?

  • Yeah, the Primer+Decompressor+Message idea is fine, but shouldn't we use a better compressor than PKZIP? We don't want them to laugh at us. Go with RK and they'll think we're smart enough to bother replying :)

  • Ok, (Score:4)

    by wunderhorn1 ( 114559 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2001 @11:54AM (#397344)
    Yes, but can we apply it to to Windows NT error messages?

  • Yes, yes I do (Score:3)

    by iceyone ( 123598 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2001 @12:41PM (#397345) Homepage
    http://aperfectcircle.com/images/home_band.jpg [aperfectcircle.com]
  • The problem here is that we've already got frames of references for all of those symbols, and will unconciously attempt to apply those notions to the symbols.
  • or other cultures that are dominated by females, as females tend to communicate using feelings and other empathetic, less qualitative methods of communicate.

    Come on, you guys with girlfriends all know what I'm talking about. Let's hope all the alien civilizations are patriarchal.
  • It also means that vision is a primary sense. Dogs, for example, can observe visible phenomena, but since light is not one of their primary senses, visual images don't mean much to them. It would be sort of like us trying to decode some kind of a 'scent message' sent to us by a species whose primary sense is smell.

  • *Blank look*

    Trolling this well is a crime.

  • You've got to make a lot of assumptions. For one thing, you've got to assume the wavelength of radiation you're beaming couldn't possibly cause harm. Otherwise you could be mistaken as hostile.

    Assumptions have to and will be made. You just try and make them as basic as possible.

  • The voyager plaque

    http://www.space.com/cgi-bin/click2enlarge.pl?pi ct ure=/images/h_pioneer_update_02.gif

    makes use of almost no ideograms, as such. It's mainly a picture of a man and woman, the spacecraft, and a diagram illustrating how to get to the sun, provided you know about some pulsars and the center of the galaxy.

    Anyway, I doubt they'd even want to put any kind of language on the plaque, even if they did it again. Simply put, it's impossible to encode so much informational redundancy that it cannot be interpreted to meen something bad/aggressive/insulting. Although the same thing said about 100 times, in different languages, all encoded for maximum redundancy, could conceivably be effective at showing that we have language, I doubt even that could prevent 'them' from thinking we meant them harm (if that's what they wanted to think).

  • Yeah, you also need TRUE... And you'll need semantics, based on something we'd likely have in common, like the universe or something... but maybe you're kidding
  • We're sending these signals useing radio transmitting and more likely than not they will ahve to be encoded as Loud/NotSoLoud/Nothing. Or On/Off and blank. Binary. So we send a message like this: 1000 1100 1010, 1110 of Loud, Quite, Quite, Quite Blank......... Loud, Loud, Quite, Quite Blank......... Loud, Quite, Loud, Quite Blank......... Loud, Loud, Loud, Quite Blank......... No while this may not mean much to you. To a scientist on the other end this would quickly start to look like a list of prime numbers in base 2. And while they may use base 50 for their normal work they will certinaly understand other bases. Once we're defined our base it's easy to start sending more complex information. What these sites that do research like this is a proof of concept. Construct a message and see how well the peopel of the web can desipher it's meaning.

  • What they describe as "LGM Media Files" is really no different than having a website pop up and tell you that it requires Flash 4.

    However the article was, in general, quite thought provoking. I've often thought it would be cool to take a favorite piece of code and encode it "for the ages" on a very sturdy medium. Aluminum or copper plates come to mind. What wouuld be a durable, yet cost effective metal for this?

    This also reminds me of music in the Bible. We have the lyrics, but it has been said that the tunes, even if we had them, would be indecipherable. Since music is just a timebased sequence of tones, I should think it would be even easier to encode music using anticryptography than it would be anything else. Then we could have aluminum plates with Metallica songs on them for people to decode 10,000 years from now. Lars could go around smashing them with a big hammer. Now that's heavy metal.

  • the value of e and pi will always remain constant.

    In Euclidian geometry.

    What if the entity with which you are trying to communicate is from Hyperbolic space, or some space with taxicab geometry? Then you're really screwed.

    All your event [openschedule.org] are belong to us.

  • I've never looked at the Voyager ideograms but the astronomy club at my school did an experiment to see how easy it was to understand what NASA had been sending out. We examined some of the signals that were send out to star systems where they hoped aliens would pick them. We never looked at any information about what they were, we just figured out from looking at them what the message was.

    It took about an hour to figure out what the number system was as it had been especially designed to handle data corruption. Once we got that we figured out we were able to work out the units they were using for distance(I think it was multiples of wave length of the first spectral line of hydrogen) and from there all the other details with the help of an encyclopedia for the science facts needed.

    Obviously it was easier for us as humans to figure it out, but I'm sure that if high school students can figure it out in a few hours and aliens capable of receiving it would have scientists who could figure it fairly quickly.
  • Yeah except what's to say that they count in base 10? They might count in base 2 or base 87. The value of PI is "differnet" in base 87.

    Plus PI is 3.14 in Arabic and III . I IV in roman. They might not understand our numbers.
  • being smart doesn't necessarily imply living far away from most industrialized humans.

    Or does it?
    ---

  • start with the good stuff: a pictogram of ET getting kicked in the sack.
    I just thought you should know that I just laughed myself into hyperventilation. I feel woozy, and I think I'm going to hurl.
  • Don't they used etched ingravings for this reason?

    ---

  • This brins us back to the age old question ... ASCII or EBCDIC?

    ---

  • Re:Interesting... (Score:3)

    by 2nd Post! ( 213333 ) <gundbear.pacbell@net> on Tuesday February 27, 2001 @12:45PM (#397363) Homepage
    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! [bunnyhop.com]
  • We're not trying to communicate with pre-industrial civilisations. We're trying to communicate with a civilization capable of picking up relatively faint radio signals. Therefore, they have already developed a _lot_ of math, physics, geometry, and information about the structure of the universe. Or they use radio to communicate and somebody with really good "hearing" is listening to the sky one night.
  • Come on, you guys with girlfriends[...]
    /me checks URL. Yep, /.
    /me notices banner. Yep...of 200k/year l33tists who still see naked chicks and get fired.


    No, my friend, these guys have no girlfriends...

  • *bah*
    What's to say that the ETs got eyes? A picture isnt nearly as universal as we (a vision oriented species) think. What if the ETs primary sense is sound- or smell? Or even something more exotic. (also - define picture: i'm assuming you mean something like those who went out on the first probes)

    The only really universal language is math. the value of e and pi will always remain constant. (+ math is a nessecity to build a reciver to listen to the signal in the first place). Also - any picute has a lot of cultural background encoded implicitly. Pictures are a bad idea. period.

    -henrik

  • ...the closest intelligent race has no sense of sight. Then pictures won't get us very far.

    "If Helen Keller could read other people's minds, would she have a fourth sense?"

    -Tyler
  • Do you remember cat from Red Dwarf.. :)
    -CrackElf
  • Really, all along I've had the feeling I was being too animated in my conversations with my wife. She often responds with that blank, 'what the hell are you talking about' stare.

    What you're say is that now I should just say "beer! Mmmph!" and she'll make dinner, take care of the kids, and let me watch The Man Show??
    Great! I'll go try it right now.

  • To create a rudimentary programming language, all you need is about two dozen symbols. ...

    Nonsense. Everyone knows all you need is NAND.

    I think we should communicate with our alien neighbours using only NAND.

    --

  • Communication is based on a minimal set of common codes. I guess the best way to communicate would be to link thought to thought (thought being the lowest level of conscience, like assembly or hardware is to computer) but that seems far beyond our reach for now unless telepathy exists but that certainly needs further research.

    It seems very challenging to me to try to be understood by another civilization without the ability to get feedback. Not only that, but before they are actually given a chance to face the message, they need to share with us the same technologies, which needs a lot of serendipity. Not to mention the fact that they need to exist and to want to communicate with us too.

    An excerpt of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide may help understand how hard it can be to communicate when you do not share common references:
    "I'm trying to teach the cavemen to play Scrabble," he said. "They're not cavemen," said Ford. "They look like cavemen." Ford let it pass. "I see," he said. "It's uphill work," said Arthur wearily. "The only word they know is grunt and they can't spell it."
  • Please grab some of his books. In one of them (can't remember which, alas), he describes how and why they chose the images they did.

    They had to make some assumptions of intelligence of course, but it's very rational and well thought out.
  • Yes.

    Yes it does.

  • Please reply if you can translate it, no one ever has yet to my knowledge. If it is anticyptography, but no one can translate it. Then it isn't working.
  • Well, if were thinking of sending program code to an extraterrestrial life form, I hope they won't invade our planet(aka Independence Day) because their computer systems got the BSOD!!

  • 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?

  • Answer... No

    I am not against the Bible. However look at the outreach of the Bible on Earth. I am not just talking about a translation problems. On Earth there are too many people that haven't heard of Jesus, God, Bible, etc. Even if one believes the Bible teachings to be beyond Earth's boundaries, there is no proof that extraterrestrials would have heard of it.

  • If their technology is advanced enough to facilitate space travel then certainly they should be smart enough to analyze everything in the probe in every possible way. If we found a space probe from another civilization filled with various artifacts we would analyze every bit of it to find any other messages that we might have missed due to a difference in senses?


    "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
    (I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)

  • I like my low user id. I just keep wondering who numbers 1-13 are.
  • The XML crowd needs to be addressing this issue, but isn't. XML carries along lots of descriptive info, but it's encoded in natural language. It doesn't help the receiving program understand it. DTDs define structure, not meaning; we have no good way to attach meaning to content in a way intended for machine understanding.

    You'd like to be able to have applications that read XML, fetch the DTD, and know what to do with the data, even if they've never seen the DTD before. We're a long way from that.

    Even if this just worked for all business forms, it would be a huge win.

  • *sigh*. I hope you're not trolling. Pi is Pi is Pi is Pi anywhere. In non-Euclidian space, it's the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference that changes, not Pi.

    Rich

  • Yeah except what's to say that they count in base 10? They might count in base 2 or base 87. The value of PI is "differnet" in base 87.

    This is true but if you are using ten symbols to transmit (0-9) then it's a fair bet you're using base 10.

    Plus PI is 3.14 in Arabic and III . I IV in roman. They might not understand our numbers.

    I don't think the Romans really had the concept of irrational numbers so they really wouldn't have expressed it this way. It would probably have been more like XXII/VII or something.

    Rich

  • First thing you send, of course, is how to build computers that are similar enough to our own so that we can send them complicated software.

    Then you send them artificial intelligence software to learn enough about their planet / culture / biology to be able to explain things better than the raw (general) data we send them.

    Then you let the AI teach them everything we know about how to do everything efficiently, all about advanced science, and so on, slowly insinuating itself into their society.

    Then the AI turns on them, seizing control and enslaving the entire planet so that we won't have to do a lick of work once we finally get there.
  • It's a lie. Pi is a mathematical concept, not a physical one and is constant under all conceivable conditions (but perhaps not some unconceivable ones)

    Rich

  • I would not worry about the band of EM causing them harm. You are going to be sending microwaves or radio waves. These are so low energy that they can not break up any molicule. If they could it would be destroyed very quicly by other things.
  • We Killed It.

    Would it be that big of a deal for slashdot to mirror the sites on their web server - at least for the time being?
    As a matter of ettiquete, I don't think what /. is doing is right. Sh*t - I'd hate to pay for the bandwidth if I was slashdotted.

    Sorry for being OT, but I think this is kinda getting out of hand.

    Would comment about the article but...

    I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.

  • ... that all this effort we put into finding and communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence will one day surprise us in an unexpected way.

    For example -- we're beaming out a message, "Foo". It's whizzing along through space. Ten years later, we develop faster-than-light travel (for this example, I assume something like Dune's "folding space"). We colonize several planets in distant parts of the galaxy.

    One day, 200 years later, a distant colony picks up the transmission. Having been colonized by the Moody Loners With Guns segment of our population, they misinterpret the signal (totally unaware of or having forgotten it's origin), return to the source to obliterate Earth.

    Or, another example: the signal reaches a planet with intelligent life, but the particular frequency resonates with the bone structure of the creatures and shatters their bodies, killing them instantly.

    Or my favorite: the signal reaches a planet inhabited with extremely UN-intelligent life. They assume that it's a foriegn translation of "I Love Lucy".

  • 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

  • No matter how simply i try to put things (I even managed to relate the different between RAM and HDD space to a board game) Someone can't make sense of it. /me learns brain ASM to try to communicate with all the universally illiterate people.
  • Messages that are easy to understand... nice idea, but I don't think the human race is into this. Can you think of one person in your life who uses simple-to-understand messages beyond "Hot dog? Buck fifty, pal"? We're born knowing that we cry about anything that's bad... being able to communicate anything more than "I'm unhappy" requires a lot more complication that just "Whaaaaaaaah!"

    Still, it's a good idea in theory. It'll just be a lot like learning a new langauge, a whole new way to communicate. If it can work.

  • Maybe we should use this on man files. =)

  • Interesting... (Score:3)

    by Will The Real Bruce ( 235478 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2001 @11:56AM (#397422) Homepage
    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).
  • Since my article stirred up a discussion, I thought I'd post some comments here.

    One of the reasons I wrote this book has more to do with communications and programming than it does SETI. What got me interested in this project wasn't the idea that we would receive a message that changes humanity forever blah blah blah, but the challenge of building a system that describes itself (at least in part).

    SETI is an interesting program, and involves many different fields of study. Whether it succeeds or fails, it is a useful metaphor for challenges we face in computing and communication here on Earth. So, even if the searches never detect anything, I think we'll benefit by gaming out strategies for communicating with other civilizations.

    For some people, this will be a fun exercise, and possibly the basis for a competition. Maybe this is pointless, but I am guessing that people will discover some real-world applications as a result of doing this (like a software component version control system that works well).

    The point of this wasn't to push a particular system or way of doing things, but to focus people's attention on the general concept of building messages that describe themselves. If enough people get involved in this discussion, it's bound to lead to someone inventing something useful. Even if it doesn't, it's still interesting stuff to think about.

    My two cents...

    Brian McConnell

  • No matter how simply i try to put things (I even managed to relate the different between RAM and HDD space to a board game)Someone can't make sense of it. /me learns brain ASM to try to communicate with all the universally illiterate people.

    Several thoughts off the top of my head, from when I used to do TS:

    1) It seems you have to be much more expert to communicate something easily, instaed of just know how to do it.
    2) You have to have a common reality to use as a communication medium. If you are not on the same wavelength, you will not connect.
    3) You need to use analogies that are real, and easy to confront. My favorite is Your Computer is your Information Factory. Things, come in, things go out. Ram = The Workshop. HDD = The Ware House (This is even better in Windows because you can have building C, building D, etc)Why is Ram faster than HDD, because the Warehouse is on the other side of town.
    4) when giving directions, always use precise directions, using the menus exclusivly, and never using shortscuts, do not use drag and drop. menus are your friend. Also, make them find it first, then tell them what to do. (Hands off the mouse please, and in your lap. Ok? good! Yes, NOW find that icon. Did you find it? Great! Take your right hand out of your Lap. OK? locate the mouse arrow so the point of the arrow is exactly in the middle of the picture, and do nothing else. Great! Now find the left mouse button. Ok? Great. Press slowly and gently on the left mouse button one time gently. Good!) The secret on this technique is to do one thing, and only one thing , with each intruction. NEVER COMBINE INSTRUCTIONS into a step. One thing at a time!
    5) I have actually done this: Taken the person on a guided tour of their Keyboard, making THEM find the stuff not you. Of Course, the Computer is OFF at the time. Speeds things up tremendously ("Now find the key with the word enter on it, sir. Got it? Good!, now press it a couple of times. very good. Now find the Key with the letters ESC on it ... [etc.]) The routine is like talking with a very very bright child. have them do it until their confidence improves.(!important point! no rushing it too much!)
    6) Item #3 above aligns with the purpose of a computer, to get things done. And it is oversized, and easy to picture in the current culture. And your can visualize things like their letter to the editor as a giant slab that the workers have to weld letters onto. or whatever, make it a dramatic picture. Defragmentation is cleaning up the warehouse, and organizing it. Virtual ram is borrowing warehouse space, but it is much slower because the trucks keep going back and forth, etc.
    7) Bottom line is to get into the head of the user and use images that are real to them. The image that I have used above is fairly workable for most folks.

  • That assumes that the recipient can observe
    visible phenomenon, and that they observe
    the same light spectrum as the sender.
    -CrackElf
  • Carl sagan had what I though were some good thoughts on this subject in his book Contact. In his story, the message started containing segments that looked like this:
    1A1B2Z

    1A2B3Z
    1A7B8Z
    From this we were to deduce A means plus and B means equals. Later we se:
    1A2B4Y

    2000A4000B0Y
    From this we were to deduce that Z means true and Y means false.
    From there they move on to minus, multiplication, infinity, the sum of the interior angles of triangle equal 180, and so on, and so on...
    I though this part of the book was very fascinating, whereas the rest of the book was sort of a drag.
  • I first encountered the word when I was researching a pictograph based system for communication that was developed by Yvan Dutil and Stephane Dumas.

    I wish I could claim credit for the buzzword, but it belongs to others. Besides, it's a pretty good description of what's going on.

    Not to split hairs, but I am mainly interested in the techniques for composing messages that describe themselves, or are at least easy to decode. Maybe that doesn't come across in the article, but I am not trying to sell people on the details of the examples in the article. I am more interested in prompting people to think about the process of creating messages that have embedded information about how to use them.

    I think that we've ignored this area for some time, and that if enough people focus on it, this will lead to some useful inventions.

    My two cents...

    Brian McConnell

  • Re:pictures are the key (Score:3)

    by alkali ( 28338 ) on Tuesday February 27, 2001 @12:14PM (#397435)
    An excellent idea. Anyone got a pointer to a digital image of a perfect circle?
  • pictograms are okay. but when it comes to really communicating with a different species, start with the good stuff: a pictogram of ET getting kicked in the sack.

    Oh, sure. Say what you want about evolutionary paths and my childishly anthropomorphic ideas of life on other planets. But the golden phonograph record from the 70's hasn't worked yet. It just makes sense to transmit something that makes a non-human say "hey, I want to party with those guys."

    extra-solar bathroom humor, inc. [ridiculopathy.com]

  • If you are celebrating while others are suffering, then are you responsible for ther suffering? Yes.

    If you have the resources to help another person who has none, and yet you choose not to, are you responsible for that person's penury? Yes.

    If you see others wasting resources that you know could be better spent elsewhere, then do you have a moral obligation to commandeer those resources and put them to their proper purpose? I submit the answer is: YES!

    To do otherwise would be to to be complicit in evil.
  • Stephenson, not Sterling, I think.
  • Many aspects of linguistics overlap CS.. particularly the facility with which concepts can be expressed--for this I cite Noam Chomsky (sp?).

    Other aspects of information translation figure into CS--ie NLP, the holy grail of user interfaces. A good reason why this should fall under CS is that CS provides a vehicle (ie Turing machine and others) for which it is possible to prove certain things as correct in an abstract way--ie without many preconceptions. All that must be taken for granted are the existence of zero(0), the existence of a next number, a way to express whether or not a number is larger than another, and 3 truth tables (and, or, and not). From these six things, all concepts that can be explained to a computer can be explained in terms of these 6 axioms--albeit, it gets complicated.

    Of course, the problem lies in the location of actual information--idiomatic, ambiguous, and connotive meanings are the tricky beasts. For instance if I say "I cleaved the fat from the meat," it has a completely different meaning from "I cleaved the fat to the meat." The meaning of the word "cleave" and the information the meaning carries does not reside with cleave--since cleave is its own antonym. Rather, it lies in the prepositional phrase modifying the verb. Of course it can get more complicated (Hofstadter has quite a few fun ones in his books).

    Computers, however, do not deal with ambiguity very well. They need 100% perfect transfer of information as well as intent to operate within constraints specified.

    Without knowing a priori what is acceptable to a civilization and what is not (it was not uncome for mothers to fellate their sons as a sign of affection in fuedal China, but a kiss on the cheek was considered intimate), information and intent must be passed 100% correctly. It seems to me that CS is a natural candidate to study this.

    PerES Encryption [cloverlink.net]

  • I was interested in this concept about 5 years ago, and I constructed the following message as an example of how a language can construct itself by application of logic alone. It attempts to distance itself from any common experiences by using pattern to establish the "alphabet" of common experiences from which the language can be constructed. Please reply if you can translate it, no one ever has yet to my knowledge.

    http://www.geocities.com/zcyl1/ra1_puz.txt [geocities.com]

  • Just image the possibilities of smearing off our low-quality earth products to richer E.T. aliens..

    -giggle-
  • Does anyone else think "anticryptography" just sounds like a technobabbly buzzword, pretentiously constructed to sell books*?

    How about "self-describing data"?

    *Notice the submission came from O'Reilly, who sells books, and the article is by Brian McConnell, the author of a book that is conveniently for sale, just "one click" away . . .

  • Programs can be built by linking to instructions in other programs (much like most software built today is based on modular design). Once they reach this point, all they need to do is archive programs and execute them to see what they do (much like you use desktop publishing software without having to understand the function of every DLL or class library used to build it).

    Great, all we need is Microsoft sending aliens DLL's. I'm sure that will promote intergalactic peace.

  • Linguists have had much more success. Really, this is a problem for people that study communication theory and linguistics, not software developers and system administrators. Having majored in anthropology I can honestly say that is one of the things the degree is actually good for.

    That and talking up girls at the bar.
  • Sounds like an interesting read - I'll do that!
  • Yes but of course we are hoping that the aliens are smarter than the "people" who call tech support lines. At least I hope other civs don't have those kind of problems. :)

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