Here's How We Could Begin Decoding an Alien Message Using Math (sciencenews.org) 64
Slashdot reader silverjacket writes:
Researchers at Oxford and elsewhere developed a method that figures out the most likely number and size of dimension in which to format a string of bits, with applications to interpreting messages from extraterrestrial intelligence (METI), if we were to receive them.
The new method "looks at every possible combination of dimension number and size," according to Science News: The researchers also measure each possible configuration's global order by seeing how much an image compression algorithm can shrink it without losing information — mathematically, randomness is less compressible than regular patterns...
Hector Zeni [one of the creators of this method] "notes that in Carl Saganâ(TM)s sci-fi novel Contact, the characters spend a lot of time figuring out that a message received from aliens is in three dimensions (specifically a video). âoeIf you have our tools, you would solve that problem in seconds and with no human intervention.â An algorithm that pieces together smaller algorithmic components in order to explain or predict data — this new method is just one way to do it — may also help us one day achieve artificial general intelligence, Zenil says. Such automated approaches don't depend on human assumptions about the signal. That opens the door to discovering forms of intelligence that might think differently from our own.
The new method "looks at every possible combination of dimension number and size," according to Science News: The researchers also measure each possible configuration's global order by seeing how much an image compression algorithm can shrink it without losing information — mathematically, randomness is less compressible than regular patterns...
Hector Zeni [one of the creators of this method] "notes that in Carl Saganâ(TM)s sci-fi novel Contact, the characters spend a lot of time figuring out that a message received from aliens is in three dimensions (specifically a video). âoeIf you have our tools, you would solve that problem in seconds and with no human intervention.â An algorithm that pieces together smaller algorithmic components in order to explain or predict data — this new method is just one way to do it — may also help us one day achieve artificial general intelligence, Zenil says. Such automated approaches don't depend on human assumptions about the signal. That opens the door to discovering forms of intelligence that might think differently from our own.
Signalling aliens would be intelligent (Score:2)
If we're sending a message out to someone with whom we share pretty much nothing except existence, we put a lot of thought into making the message as easy to figure out as possible.
There has been discussion about sending messages starting with prime numbers, then moving on to bursts of bits each burst as long as one prime and then the other to send a basic image. Then you can move on to sending additional images to make video, or altering the quality of the bits in some way to indicate they're more than ju
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>then moving on to bursts of bits each burst as long as one prime and then the other to send a basic image.
Correction - a group of bits equal to the first prime, a group of bursts equal to the second prime. This gives you the idea (hopefully) that you're looking at something [x] long to be compared to [y] other entries. If they figure that out, they might get the image upside down or backward, but they'd get the image.
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So you are saying that Conservatives are aliens. Who knew?
Projection (Score:1)
They were the lizard overlords with the space lasers the whole time. Jeez the projection.
I always thought they tasted different but figured liberals ate more vegetables or something.
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You Assume Contact will be Deliberate (Score:2)
...or they're intelligent enough to have figured out how to send a message we wouldn't have to work very hard to decode.
You are assuming that they are deliberately trying to communicate with us. Our radio and TV transmissions have been beaming out from Earth for a century now and if an alien race had sensitive enough equipment to pick those up they may be very hard to decode because we did not intend for these broadcasts to be received by them.
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>Our radio and TV transmissions have been beaming out from Earth for a century now and if an alien race had sensitive enough equipment to pick those up they may be very hard to decode because we did not intend for these broadcasts to be received by them.
Be prepared to be disappointed - our accidental broadcasts are so weak they fade into background noise very quickly without an improbably large antenna array to receive them.
Likewise, it would take an incredibly powerful and focused transmission to be det
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So far, intelligent life doesn't appear to be common enough we should expect neighbours to be anywhere near within practical radio communication range.
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Tech is irrelevant, there just aren't enough decent candidate worlds within radio range, so there's nobody there to have or not have radios.
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Tech is irrelevant, there just aren't enough decent candidate worlds within radio range
That we have found yet and assuming that Earthlike conditions are the only ones in which life can evolve.
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>Our radio and TV transmissions have been beaming out from Earth for a century now and if an alien race had sensitive enough equipment to pick those up they may be very hard to decode because we did not intend for these broadcasts to be received by them.
Rubbish.
Amplitude modulation (the majority of all radio broadcasts to date) would be trivially decoded by anything capable of building a radio receiver.
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That was a quote... you appear to have replied one level too far down the tree.
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There has been discussion about sending messages starting with prime numbers, then moving on to bursts of bits each burst as long as one prime and then the other to send a basic image.
This was all done 50 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
How is it news in 2023?
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I'd tell you to read the paper, but it's not worth anyone's time. Though as it happens, the Arecibo message is specifically discussed.
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and they're not
How do you know?
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But you have to watch out for subtle earth-centric assumptions like "a two-dimensional array could represent a series of pictures", which only makes any sense at all to somebody who has sense-organs for electromagne
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Sound is a common thing to sense because both liquids and gasses transmit it, and it gives you a lot of potential information about predators. In social animals, being able to make sounds for others to detect means sharing warnings and improving predator detection further.
That convergent evolution wouldn't result in a sense of hearing seems like a long shot. Likewise, sight - whether IR, UV or similar to ours, seems like another obvious evolutionary outcome.
We have a sense of smell and a sense of
Interesting (Score:1)
Re: Interesting (Score:1)
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You know you can turn off the pretty, artistic quotes, right? Go back to the eyeball-searing ASCII ones.
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There are a lot of very odd things in the paper, which I'll point out hasn't been through peer review.
Our results are not only agnostic to prior knowledge of encoding-decoding schemes, but also demonstrate sufficient conditions in this zero-knowledge context for enabling the reconstruction of the original message (i.e., the original object embedded into the original multidimensional space to be conveyed to the receiver) in one-way communication channels
There a quite a few limitations to that claim, many of which are never mentioned or go completely unnoticed! For example:
Once a row (or, alternatively, a column) is fixed in a bidimensional space, the remaining rows and columns are dependent on the initial row fixation.
Which obviously doesn't apply if the encoding is variable-length. There is no limitations section, which is a huge red-flag.
The idea itself doesn't seem all that bad. Essentially, you try every reasonable combination of lengths for some number of dimensions and check to see how random
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Where in my post did I say anything that even remotely implies that I believe the article assumes all digital transmissions are binary?
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The article never mentions that we're assuming all digital transmissions are binary, when in fact an alien race could just as easily transmit in ternary or some other base.
In theory, yes. But why do we transmit "in binary"? There's nothing magic to it that's related to us in particular.
We do this because Physics makes this the easiest thing to do: it's the most simple answer to any question -- Yes or No. Something either Is or Isn't. Current or not. Spin Up or Down. Spin Up-Down, or Left-Right. Excited QM state or Ground state. You get the picture ;-)
Whoever this is, they'll presumably still be wielding the same physics as we do. There's nothing magic about it, ternary or som
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Re: Interesting (Score:2)
Physics is not magic and the quantum realm is not Narnia. Not everything is possible.
Within the limits of the 4 fundamental interactions there's very little we haven't understood yet. Yes, also understand "the quantum realm" pretty well by now. There's actually only 1 interaction they can use for long-range communication (electro-magnetism), and possibly a 2nd (gravitation) far beyond our capabilities.
In any case, we wouldn't be able to detect anything else except for electromagetism, even if, as if by magi
Duh ... (Score:2)
"ChatGPT, decode this alien message using Math."
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"ChatGPT, decode this alien message using Math."
Sounds like a perfect time for ChatGPT to give one of its convincing bullshit responses.
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Re: Duh ... (Score:2)
I so read that as "meth" and somehow it makes more sense.
Let's try this (Score:2)
We use the same techniques the "aliens" would use, and direct those messages to:
Octopuses
Whales
Dolphins
Gorillas
Chimpanzees
The signal could be sent such that the recipient species could detect it — eg for whales use sound, for the octopus, coloured light.
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We have several creatures that also inhabit this planet that show considerable intelligence..
As soon as those animals invent spaceflight, we'll stop eating them.
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As soon as those animals invent spaceflight, we'll stop eating them.
Speak for yourself buddy.
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I'm pretty sure the smartest animal I've ever eaten meat from was a pig. This is probably true for most Americans, and likely for most Europeans as well.
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We have several creatures that also inhabit this planet that show considerable intelligence.
We've been observing them very closely and we haven't seen signs of them knowing what prime numbers are.
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We've been observing them very closely and we haven't seen signs of them knowing what prime numbers are.
Cicadas can count to 17, though we're not sure how. I suppose they call them Magicicada for a reason.
Why don't we start with terrestrial life? (Score:5, Interesting)
What about trying to decode the messages whales, dolphins exchange? what about chemical messages, like the ones ants use? what about color patterns some cephalopods use?
There are many 'intelligent' conversations on earth that have not been deciphered. How do we assume we could do that with extraterrestrial life?
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What about trying to decode the messages whales, dolphins exchange? what about chemical messages, like the ones ants use? what about color patterns some cephalopods use?
There are many 'intelligent' conversations on earth that have not been deciphered. How do we assume we could do that with extraterrestrial life?
Different problems. Those species do not use math to communicate, they use natural developed communication systems.
The assumption with aliens is that a civilization capable to send electromagnetic signals through space and willing to establish contact with another culture would need to develop (and try to use) universal patterns based on the regularities and laws found in the universe, what we call 'math'.
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The claims made by the headline, the article, and the paper are misleading. This won't do much of anything to help you decipher an alien message. All it does is (potentially) narrow the possibilities for the 'shape' of the message, it won't help you at all with the content.
If you're familiar with the Arecibo message, one question you might have is how they will figure out what the dimensions are, assuming they guess that it's a picture. In that case, the length of the message was selected to be the produ
How? (Score:2)
I'm sure AlienGPT will pop up immediately.
Part of the story (Score:2)
This "news" is coming out now, so that when the gumint admits about the aliens -- which will happen after the State Of The Union address -- they can explain how the ongoing communications have been working.
Unfortunately, it turns out the messages were RFNI (Request For Novel Ingrediants) for the standard intergalactic Prime Rib recipe.
IT'S A COOKBOOK, PEOPLE!!!!
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To Serve Man
So long as we remember... (Score:1)
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That doesn't make any sense.
Has anyone even decoded Linear B (Score:2)
or the Indus Valley script?
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Yes, Linear B has been decoded. It's Linear A which hasn't been decoded yet.
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Linear A isn't, but the surviving body of sample texts is too small and fragmented for any normal type of analytical approach to be really useful. (There are more than a thousand surviving bits and pieces, and if you string them all together end-to-end it adds up to less than two pages' worth. It's like having 1-3 pieces each from several hundred different thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles. There's no way to put together a coherent picture.) The Indus script corpus has a similar
the uncertainty of cultural meanings (Score:2)
Earth creatures, I am highly insulted by your bit string. All those zero bits. FU. Prepare to die.
-- Zornog, Emperor of the Zodupian Galaxy
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To the Honoured Emperor of the Zodupian Galaxy and all his loyal subjects,
I have been instructed by the newly-anointed K'Breel, Mighty Emperor of Mars, Dominarch of Deimos, Puissant Father of Phobos, Multiply-Tentacled Master of the Red Sands and Worshipful Ruler of All to relay the following message:
"Our subjects rejoice at the news of your coming visit on pain of vacuum desiccation and surgical removal of the upper-left and anterior gas sacs, and invite you to join us in our efforts to exterminate the
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We share your abhorrence at their unholy use of whitespace
I knew Python was bad, but I didn't know it would doom mankind
Aliens are using UWB and encryption (Score:2)
If the only tool (Score:2)
If the only tool you have is a hammer, every stick of butter looks like a nail.
Stanislaw Lem had the answer a few years ago. (Score:1)
Translation: (Score:2)
Return orange man's hair back to us or else we eat your genitals and pets. This is our last warning to you humans."