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Anticryptography 163
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.
Uh, yeah. (Score:2)
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."
Re:Incompetence... (Score:1)
That was my point...the (Intellectual property?) thing was THEIRS, not mine.
Re:pictures are the key (Score:1)
All your event [openschedule.org] are belong to us.
Rama (Score:1)
Re:pictures are the key (Score:2)
Rich
Excellent Operating System Idea! (Score:1)
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
Re:pictures are the key (Score:1)
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)?
just need a couple language extensions (Score:1)
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 (Score:2)
Hello gentlemen!!!
All your base are belong to us.
To any and all anti-crytographers listening... (Score:1)
Re:pictures are the key, yes lets use math (Score:1)
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.
Interesting concept (Score:2)
(And can a GnuPG and anti-GnuPG exist on the same drive, without converting into raw bits?)
STEPHENSON'S "Diamond Age" (Score:1)
"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
Re:pictures are the key - but even then... (Score:2)
Carl Sagan led the creation of the drawings on the Voyager payload, and he's really smart.
Really smart.
Re:pictures are the key - but even then... (Score:1)
Or they might be backwards if the majority of the population was left-handed instead of right-handed.
Re:ask slashdot: Mirroring? (Score:1)
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.
Re:No, you're wrong. That's exactly the point (Score:1)
UNL (Score:1)
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.
Makes sens. (Score:1)
--
RTFM (Score:1)
Emotional speech (smileys, etc) (Score:1)
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
Re:pictures are the key (Score:1)
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.
automated help desk (Score:1)
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)
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.
Re:"Anticryptography"?! (Score:2)
Sounds good to me!
the, ummm, AntiCypher (no relation, really)
Sending messages? (Score:1)
--
The Combinatorial Heirarchy (Score:3)
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.
Re:pictures are the key - but even then... (Score:2)
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?
Re:pictures are the key - but even then... (Score:1)
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.
Aha! (Score:1)
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]
Re:Tech Supporters Have tried this.... (Score:2)
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.
You Mean Like The RIAA? (Score:1)
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 the key (Score:2)
PKZIP? (Score:1)
Ok, (Score:4)
Yes, yes I do (Score:3)
Re:Sample Anticryptography (Score:2)
This won't work for matriarchal aliens (Score:1)
Come on, you guys with girlfriends all know what I'm talking about. Let's hope all the alien civilizations are patriarchal.
Re:pictures are the key (Score:2)
Re:Wouldn't it be easier to use The Bible (Score:1)
*Blank look*
Trolling this well is a crime.
Re:pictures are the key (Score:2)
Assumptions have to and will be made. You just try and make them as basic as possible.
Free anticryptography software (Score:1)
Re:pictures are the key - but even then... (Score:1)
http://www.space.com/cgi-bin/click2enlarge.pl?p
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).
Re:All you need is NAND (Score:1)
Let's Try this (Score:1)
LGM Media Files -- We Already Have Them. (Score:2)
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.
Re:pictures are the key (Score:2)
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.
Re:pictures are the key - but even then... (Score:2)
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.
Re:pictures are the key (Score:1)
Plus PI is 3.14 in Arabic and III . I IV in roman. They might not understand our numbers.
But ... (Score:1)
Or does it?
---
Re:bathroom humor = intergalactic language (Score:2)
Re:pictures are the key (Score:1)
---
Re:pictures are the key (Score:1)
---
Re:Interesting... (Score:3)
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]
Re:pictures are the key - but even then... (Score:2)
Re:This won't work for matriarchal aliens (Score:1)
/me notices banner. Yep...of 200k/year l33tists who still see naked chicks and get fired.
No, my friend, these guys have no girlfriends...
Re:pictures are the key (Score:2)
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
Unless... (Score:1)
"If Helen Keller could read other people's minds, would she have a fourth sense?"
-Tyler
Re:pictures are the key (Score:1)
-CrackElf
This is a marriage breakthrough! (Score:1)
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.
All you need is NAND (Score:2)
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.
--
Is there any assembly equivalent to thinking ? (Score:1)
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."
Re:pictures are the key - but even then... (Score:2)
They had to make some assumptions of intelligence of course, but it's very rational and well thought out.
Re:But ... (Score:1)
Yes it does.
Re:Sample Anticryptography (Score:2)
Just great! (Score:2)
Re:pictures are the key - but even then... (Score:4)
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?
Re:Wouldn't it be easier to use The Bible (Score:2)
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.
Re:pictures are the key (Score:2)
"Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto"
(I am a man: nothing human is alien to me)
OT: Hell no! (Score:2)
Self-describing data (Score:2)
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.
Re:pictures are the key (Score:2)
Rich
Re:pictures are the key (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
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.
Re:pictures are the key, yes lets use math (Score:2)
Rich
Re:pictures are the key (Score:2)
Cool... (Score:2)
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
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.
I have this odd idea... (Score:2)
... 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".
ask slashdot: Mirroring? (Score:3)
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
Tech Supporters Have tried this.... (Score:2)
What a concept (Score:2)
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.
man files (Score:2)
Interesting... (Score:3)
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).
Why I wrote this article (and the book) (Score:2)
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
Re:Tech Supporters Have tried this.... (Score:2)
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. ... [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!)
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
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.
Re:pictures are the key (Score:2)
visible phenomenon, and that they observe
the same light spectrum as the sender.
-CrackElf
Carl Sagan's Contact (Score:2)
From this we were to deduce A means plus and B means equals. Later we se:
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.
Re:"Anticryptography"?! (Score:2)
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)
bathroom humor = intergalactic language (Score:2)
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]
No, you're wrong. That's exactly the point (Score:2)
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.
Re:Other uses (Score:2)
Re:Tech Supporters Have tried this.... (Score:2)
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]
Sample Anticryptography (Score:2)
http://www.geocities.com/zcyl1/ra1_puz.txt [geocities.com]
SPAM by any other name... (Score:2)
-giggle-
"Anticryptography"?! (Score:2)
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 . . .
But MS will fsck it up... (Score:2)
Great, all we need is Microsoft sending aliens DLL's. I'm sure that will promote intergalactic peace.
Re:Tech Supporters Have tried this.... (Score:2)
That and talking up girls at the bar.
Re:pictures are the key - but even then... (Score:2)
Re:Tech Supporters Have tried this.... (Score:2)