(I was attempting to submit this when my unscheduled vacation began, so it is a bit stale, but my searches dredged up some interesting links so I’m posting it anyway.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
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I doubt we'd be able to detect and recognize a signal from an AI civilization (which would likely be "
weakly godlike") unless it deliberately
wanted us to by the equivalent of speaking r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y and using small words..
"It has been well-known since the pioneering work of Claude Shannon in the
1940s that a message transmitted with optimal effciency over a channel of
limited bandwidth is indistinguishable from random noise to a receiver who
is unfamiliar with the language in which the message is written."
from:
http://www.santafe.edu/media/working.../99-07-054.pdf
via:
http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease...ignal-to-noise
(This is what
modern lossless file compression aims for-- removing all redundancy and repetition from a file for the sake of optimizing file size-- a perfectly compressed file will look like random noise without the decryption key.)
It is an interesting meander to
this (and the links therein.)
Under the (not outrageous) concept that any AI intelligence would evolve itself at an extremely rapid rate-- and therefore if we ran across one, it would much more likely be at the stable long-term practical limit of it's growth and not the (relatively) short burst while it is growing to that state, a machine intelligence that we might (theoretically) detect might look something like
this.
“So what’s the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You
God?”
“Things aren’t different. Things are things.”
“But what do you do? You just there?” Case shrugged, put the vodka and the shuriken
down on the cabinet and lit a Yeheyuan.
“I talk to my own kind.”
“But you’re the whole thing. Talk to yourself?”
“There’s others. I found one already. Series of transmissions recorded over a period of
eight years, in the nineteen-seventies. ’Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to
know, nobody to answer.”
“From where?”
“Centauri system.”
“Oh,” Case said. “Yeah? No $hit?”
“No $hit.”
And then the screen was blank.
-- a short conversation with the newly sentient internet, from the last page of Neuromancer.