
Lincos language - feltsense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_language
======
hcarvalhoalves
I've always thought ideas like these to be cool exercises, but ultimately so
naive.

It seems there are so many underlying assumptions on what intelligence looks
like for this to make any sense. E.g. why do we assume another intelligent
being would necessarily follow a linear, sequential conversation? or that the
conversation would happen in the same time-scale we are used to as humans? or
that an extraterrestrial being would care about conversation at all, instead
of exchanging information via other means, like direct chemical reactions,
genetics, or apparent random noise, and expecting us to pick all the implicit
signals?

I bet we wouldn't be able to recognise certain life forms if they literally
appeared before us, because we have such strong biases of what "life" looks
like - we can't even reach consensus over viruses being life forms, despite
being gene-based, following natural selection, etc. Let alone "intelligent
life forms" or anything else that a virtually infinite universe could throw at
us.

PS: Maybe my notion of "extraterrestrial" has been deeply influenced by H. P.
Lovecraft. :D

~~~
andrewflnr
I think it's quite probable that even if some entity or group finds linear
sequences of symbols unnatural, if they're smart enough to pick it up they're
also smart enough to piece together the meaning the hard way, the same way we
would if presented with something very foreign. Any technological entity has
encountered and mastered lots of foreign systems, including us. Biochemistry,
quantum mechanics, heck, even classical mechanics don't come to humans
naturally, but we're getting by pretty well anyway.

As for recognizing life, eh, I don't think it's an accident that we're carbon-
based blobs of relatively flexible, mobile matter. If there was a more likely
template, that's probably what we would be based on instead.

~~~
mFixman
Our definition of "intelligence" is overfit for humanity. There's no reason
why an alien civilization have any interest in linear sequences.

The way I see it, any communication system that doesn't make it possible to
communicate with starfish won't make it possible to communicate with aliens
either.

~~~
Koshkin
Well, radio communication is serial (and even television signal is encoded as
a linear sequence). Looks like serial protocols are the most natural, simple,
and reliable of all. And do not forget about the natural numbers!

~~~
giantrobot
Lots of natural phenomena are "serial" just due to entropy. Radioactive decay,
friction, even pulsars are going to tell intelligent species that things
happen sequentially in the time domain.

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feltsense
I posted this because Alan Kay linked to it in the context of objects that
come with their own interpreters:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11957719](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11957719).

This was in the same thread where he and Rich Hickey discussed "data":
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945722),
which was mentioned here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23891069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23891069).

~~~
dwohnitmok
That data thread makes me very sad. Two technology leaders completely talking
past each other and not understanding the other over and over again.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Maybe they need... an interpreter?

Right, I'll show myself out...

------
moonchild
From _Gödel, Escher, Bach_ , chap. 6, Douglas Hofstadter:

> In these examples of decipherment of out-of-context messages, we can
> separate out fairly clearly three levels of information: (1) the _frame_
> message; (2) the _outer_ message; (3) the _inner_ message. The one we are
> most familiar with is (3), the inner message; it is the message which is
> supposed to be transmitted: the emotional experiences in music, the
> phenotype in genetics, the royalty and rites of ancient civilizations in
> tablets, etc.

> To understand the inner message is to have extracted the meaning intended by
> the sender.

> The frame message is the message 'I am a message; decode me if you can!';
> and it is implicitly conveyed by the gross structural aspects of any
> information-bearer.

> To understand the frame message is to recognize the need for a decoding-
> mechanism.

> If the frame message is recognized as such, then attention is switched to
> level (2), the outer message. This is information, implicitly carried by
> symbol-patterns and structures in the message, which tells how to decode the
> inner message.

> To understand the outer message is to build, or know how to build, the
> correct decoding mechanism for the inner message.

> This outer level is perforce an implicit message, in the sense that the
> sender cannot ensure that it will be understood. It would be a vain effort
> to send instructions which tell how to decode the outer message, for they
> would have to be part of the inner message, which can only be understood
> once the decoding mechanism has been found. For this reason, the _outer
> message is necessarily a set of triggers_ , rather than a message which can
> be revealed by a known decoder.

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13415
I've always been interested in Freudenthal's work, although I've never had the
time to work through the book in detail. A second volume was planned but never
finished. That's such a pity, because in that volume he planned to formalize
interesting social concepts.

Anyway, it's a must read for anyone interested in communication with aliens. I
believe it would work, and his way of distinguishing between false and wrong
is ingenious. The book is unfortunately hard to get, but there are digital
copies around. Good reading if you don't shy away from some old-style Carnap-
inspired logic notation.

------
KhoomeiK
I've always been interested in constructed languages, but reading through this
article just now made me wonder about curriculum learning for NLP models.
Could better generalizable language models be achieved through curriculum
learning of this sort, where simple mathematics and logic are introduced
before anything else? The curriculum learning papers I've seen so far are
mostly for specific tasks, like introducing simple questions for QA tasks
before more complicated multi-hop reasoning.

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bmn__
> In 1999, the astrophysicists encoded a message in Lincos and used the
> Yevpatoria RT-70 radio telescope in Ukraine to beam it towards close stars.
> This is known as Cosmic Call.

[https://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/intro.html](https://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/intro.html)
"it's fun to see if you're as smart as an alien"

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tgb
Apparently one of my all-time favorite bands is named after the message sent
in this message, The Evpatoria Report. I haven't listened to them in a while,
so it was a nice reminder seeing this.

[https://youtu.be/GazWRcrwq-s](https://youtu.be/GazWRcrwq-s)

~~~
Lunrtick
Taijin Kyofusho was the first song of theirs I heard - wow. Such a great band!

------
Jtsummers
This is much like the premise of the pre-contest materials for this year's
ICFP contest. A series of images (as decoded from audio) that translated into
examples of numbers, math/logic operators, and combinators.

------
potiuper
"It teaches natural numbers by a series of repeated pulses", but receiver
would not be able to determine if it was some finite sequence.

~~~
paganel
Re natural numbers, people in our society (a technicist one) seem to forget
that "natural numbers" are actually a social construct, there's nothing
"natural" about them, they're not "innate"/"pre-existing" in a Platon-like
universe of ideas, they only helped us from some-point on to do some
technicist stuff (from collecting taxes in Roman times to sending rockets to
the Moon in the 1960s) but I'm not sure that the Universe as a whole "cares"
so much about them.

We as a species did have the opportunity at some point in our past of not
"choosing" the natural numbers way (and of not choosing the principle of non-
contradiction more generally speaking), I'm talking about Heraclitus and
presumably some other of his disciples, but we chose not to.

As such, we could "meet" an alien society which has chosen the Heraclitus way,
or any other way that doesn't involve "separating" stuff into "units" (like
natural numbers are), or of thinking about the Universe as "stuff", or any
other idea/concept that is not currently in use by our society. In which case
all this trouble would have been for nothing, only helps with our existential
solipsism as a species.

~~~
gus_massa
They can probably count the stars and the can probably count the Hydrogen
atoms. It is a very good guess that they understand the "natural" numbers.

~~~
paganel
> They can probably count the stars

Those aliens could have then asked, similar to Parmenides: where does a star
"end" for you to be able to "count" it as a separate entity? From the wiki
page [1]:

> and thus despite appearances everything exists as one, giant, unchanging
> thing

The pre-socratics were a very interesting bunch, again, it's a social-
constructed presumption to think that those possible aliens have all chosen
the way of Aristotle and Platon like we did.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmenides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmenides)

~~~
gus_massa
Relevant [https://xkcd.com/1189/](https://xkcd.com/1189/)

It's not clear where the Solar system ends, and it's not clear where a star
ends. There are several criteria and they give different numbers. But they
have all the same order of magnitude that is much smaller than the distance
between the stars. For most orbital calculations you can take the star as a
single point, and assume that the space is empty. Aliens probably had done a
similar approximation and can count star easily.

------
thekaleb
When trying to convey the length of time for a second how does one account for
Doppler shift?

~~~
recursivecaveat
As long as they actually understand the message, you can include a way to
correct any shift by relating the second back to a fundamental constant; like
the voyager golden record does with the hydrogen transition time.

