[HN Gopher] Lincos language
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Lincos language
Author : feltsense
Score : 45 points
Date : 2020-07-20 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| [deleted]
| moonchild wrote:
| From _Godel, Escher, Bach_ , 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 and 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.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| 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.
| feltsense wrote:
| 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.
|
| This was in the same thread where he and Rich Hickey discussed
| "data": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945722, which was
| mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23891069.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Maybe they need... an interpreter?
|
| Right, I'll show myself out...
| potiuper wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| 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.
| 13415 wrote:
| 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.
| tgb wrote:
| 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
| Lunrtick wrote:
| Taijin Kyofusho was the first song of theirs I heard - wow.
| Such a great band!
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| naringas wrote:
| > why do we assume another intelligent being would necessarily
| follow a linear, sequential conversation?
|
| it's also cool to ask why do we? (...follow linear, sequential
| conversations?)
| projektfu wrote:
| Yes, there is likely a genetic basis to human language
| structure, and to expect it to be intelligible by aliens is a
| big assumption. Very little of our science fiction deals with
| intelligent but bizarre aliens.
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