6 ms·

How would you build a spaceship (or international ship... Whatever) without a concept of numbers?

Razengan 10y ago
How do we make music without having a name for each frequency? Sure we use letters and numbers to represent them, and words for many musical concepts, but people have been making music without knowing these and since long before they were codified.. The number line is a continuous stream, right? Carrying on from my earlier comment [0], an alien species could use a smooth gradient of colors to represent numbers; their senses may be such that they interpret a distinct shade, or a "step" or "tick", after a small difference in wavelength/frequency, and they use those steps to represent integers, and a transition between two shades to represent fractions.. So if I want to tell you I want 1 of something, I just show you a deep violet. If I want 2, I "say" a ever-so-slightly less saturated violet. Green may mean a million, and reds would be used for astronomical scales. :) But they may not "think" in terms of "numbers" as we do; they would just see and imagine colors and associate them with a sense of quantity, or comparison.. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969500
- Udik 10y ago
  Yes. "How much acceleration can this part withstand?" "I'd say violet, but with a shade of pink". "Perfect!". I'm sure their spaceships will work just fine.
  - IIIIIIIIIIII 10y ago
    So it doesn't work because you can't imagine a way different from what you know. Okay.
  - Razengan 10y ago
    http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/ http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/
  - alpha_squared 10y ago
    That seems like an awfully ethnocentric perspective. It sounds like, "we understand things this way, therefore things can only be understood this way." I'm not saying there is or isn't more than one way to understand complex topics, but that it's possible there may not be only one way.
    - catshirt 10y ago
      seemed like joke not a criticism. I laughed.
      - alpha_squared 10y ago
        The author is arguing that stance, quite strongly, in another comment.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13971010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13971010
        catshirt 10y ago
        hm. well, i can't argue. i'm not the expert on the aliens we haven't found yet.
  - panglott 10y ago
    I think the musical metaphor makes more sense to us, with the obvious analogy to the length of a vibrating string. "This part is D-flat long, when it needs to be C-sharp!"
  - david-given 10y ago
    You could totally do this. We tend to deal numbers by turning them into symbol sequences and then applying grammatical rules to them --- we're good at grammar, we have hardware acceleration for it. Digital computers work the same way: the quantity is measured, turned into a number, turned into a symbol sequence, then we manipulate those symbols before turning them back into a number. But analogue computers work by taking a measurement, representing it directly as a potential, and then performing various analogue operations on that potential to yield another potential. At no point during the operation is the potential converted to a number. (Disclaimer: our analogue computers do use numbers for I/O, because they measure the result potential and express it in ways we can understand, but that's just a UI issue.) So I can totally imagine an alien technology that manipulated quantities using mathematical operations without having any way to express those quantities themselves other than in relation to other quantities. They could use symbol streams to represent the relationships --- if so, they'd probably get on quite well with algebra --- but the idea of representing the potentials themselves as a power series would be completely alien to them.
    - Udik 10y ago
      There are very good reasons for which we aren't typing these comments on analog computers, and we don't have analog computers in our pockets, and all the data we store, including everything that we experience as analog (music, images, video) are actually stored in digital format. And before that, the way we write language, numbers, and music is digital, not analog- despite the fact that we seem to think more in an analog way than a digital one. Come to think of it, even our language is digital, despite the fact that our experiences are not and we often struggle to find the combination of words that will better reproduce the meaning we have in our minds. Come on, this is HN, how can you not see the advantage of calculating with numbers, and writing down numbers, in place of approximate quantities? And why we converted an entire century's worth of audio and photographic recordings to a digital format?
      - david-given 10y ago
        Yes --- we do that because we are symbolic creatures. We serialise thoughts into sequences of symbols so that we can express them tonally, in series, to other people. We express mathematical concepts the same way. Naturally, the machines we built to help us do these things also work symbolically. Machines built by people who think differently will work differently.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
TuringTest 10y ago
Who says they build spaceships? Maybe they grow spaceships, and evolve various versions until one of them has the desired properties for space travel. You don't even need to be intelligent to achieve that.
sidegrid 10y ago
Interdimensional.

How do we make music without having a name for each frequency? Sure we use letters and numbers to represent them, and words for many musical concepts, but people have been making music without knowing these and since long before they were codified.. The number line is a continuous stream, right? Carrying on from my earlier comment [0], an alien species could use a smooth gradient of colors to represent numbers; their senses may be such that they interpret a distinct shade, or a "step" or "tick", after a small difference in wavelength/frequency, and they use those steps to represent integers, and a transition between two shades to represent fractions.. So if I want to tell you I want 1 of something, I just show you a deep violet. If I want 2, I "say" a ever-so-slightly less saturated violet. Green may mean a million, and reds would be used for astronomical scales. :) But they may not "think" in terms of "numbers" as we do; they would just see and imagine colors and associate them with a sense of quantity, or comparison.. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13969500

Udik 10y ago
Yes. "How much acceleration can this part withstand?" "I'd say violet, but with a shade of pink". "Perfect!". I'm sure their spaceships will work just fine.
- IIIIIIIIIIII 10y ago
  So it doesn't work because you can't imagine a way different from what you know. Okay.
- Razengan 10y ago
  http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/ http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/
- alpha_squared 10y ago
  That seems like an awfully ethnocentric perspective. It sounds like, "we understand things this way, therefore things can only be understood this way." I'm not saying there is or isn't more than one way to understand complex topics, but that it's possible there may not be only one way.
  - catshirt 10y ago
    seemed like joke not a criticism. I laughed.
    - alpha_squared 10y ago
      The author is arguing that stance, quite strongly, in another comment.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13971010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13971010
      - catshirt 10y ago
        hm. well, i can't argue. i'm not the expert on the aliens we haven't found yet.
- panglott 10y ago
  I think the musical metaphor makes more sense to us, with the obvious analogy to the length of a vibrating string. "This part is D-flat long, when it needs to be C-sharp!"
- david-given 10y ago
  You could totally do this. We tend to deal numbers by turning them into symbol sequences and then applying grammatical rules to them --- we're good at grammar, we have hardware acceleration for it. Digital computers work the same way: the quantity is measured, turned into a number, turned into a symbol sequence, then we manipulate those symbols before turning them back into a number. But analogue computers work by taking a measurement, representing it directly as a potential, and then performing various analogue operations on that potential to yield another potential. At no point during the operation is the potential converted to a number. (Disclaimer: our analogue computers do use numbers for I/O, because they measure the result potential and express it in ways we can understand, but that's just a UI issue.) So I can totally imagine an alien technology that manipulated quantities using mathematical operations without having any way to express those quantities themselves other than in relation to other quantities. They could use symbol streams to represent the relationships --- if so, they'd probably get on quite well with algebra --- but the idea of representing the potentials themselves as a power series would be completely alien to them.
  - Udik 10y ago
    There are very good reasons for which we aren't typing these comments on analog computers, and we don't have analog computers in our pockets, and all the data we store, including everything that we experience as analog (music, images, video) are actually stored in digital format. And before that, the way we write language, numbers, and music is digital, not analog- despite the fact that we seem to think more in an analog way than a digital one. Come to think of it, even our language is digital, despite the fact that our experiences are not and we often struggle to find the combination of words that will better reproduce the meaning we have in our minds. Come on, this is HN, how can you not see the advantage of calculating with numbers, and writing down numbers, in place of approximate quantities? And why we converted an entire century's worth of audio and photographic recordings to a digital format?
    - david-given 10y ago
      Yes --- we do that because we are symbolic creatures. We serialise thoughts into sequences of symbols so that we can express them tonally, in series, to other people. We express mathematical concepts the same way. Naturally, the machines we built to help us do these things also work symbolically. Machines built by people who think differently will work differently.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

TuringTest 10y ago

Who says they build spaceships? Maybe they grow spaceships, and evolve various versions until one of them has the desired properties for space travel. You don't even need to be intelligent to achieve that.

sidegrid 10y ago

Interdimensional.