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And where does the information about the ASCII format go?
by LASR 11y ago
And where does the information about the ASCII format go?
- Houshalter 11y agoYou could start with uncompressed bitmaps for images, and the pictures can explain all the necessary information. Like they do with the golden records on the voyager probes. I don't think the information stored should be compressed. Or if it is, it should be very simple compression, like a huffman encoding. That way it wouldn't just look like random data. There would be patterns in it, and statistical analyses could reveal lots of information.
- ant6n 11y agoAssuming you store the text in English, you also need to teach that language..
- Houshalter 11y agoNot necessarily. But you could easily add a few images with English descriptions next to them. That would be enough linguists to decipher the rest.
- fit2rule 11y agoJust include a dictionary that is word-complete - i.e. does not contain any word or symbol that it doesn't also define.
- Houshalter 11y agoAll dictionaries are circular. Though it would be possible to learn the relationships between words, and perhaps decipher it that way.
- fit2rule 11y agoActually, not all dictionaries are circular - some are more definition-complete than others, and it does make a difference.
- Houshalter 11y agoI mean circular, in that the definition's reference each other. E.g. if the definition for "happy" was "not sad" and the definition for "sad" was "not happy. If you didn't know one of those words already, the dictionary would be useless.
- steve19 11y agoEasy. Any civilization advanced enough to read microscopic encoded data would be advanced enough to do basic statistical analysis on ASCII encoded English/whatever and work out what it is. The harder part is figuring out how to understand English. An example of this being done recently is MIT students decoding the ancient language Ugaritic http://news.mit.edu/2010/ugaritic-barzilay-0630 http://news.mit.edu/2010/ugaritic-barzilay-0630
- rbanffy 11y ago300M years is a very long time. Unless there is some continuity in the use of the stored information, in a way it's documented, translated and reinterpreted, there is no hope something alive 300M years from now, something that will not be remotely human, will be able to understand it any more than we understand the songs sponges sing each other.