Anticryptography

I just got my aluminum hat tuned up.

Communicating with an unknown recipient is something fasinates me.  Strangely enough, there are a number of early branches of computer language design in developing artificial intelligence, as well as communication theory.

One of the early articles, and it reads like one of the X-files can be found on the NSA server (note that the url is NSA.GOV, so it must  be true right?  RIGHT!?!?)

• https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_spectrum/communications_with_extraterrestrial.pdf
  • Frankly this article from the 1960s is a fun read, really

For today's blog, take a look at this link: https://www.oreilly.com/news/seti_0201.html, Anticryptography, What does this mean? (Much of this article uses the referenced link.)  In the article above, there is the early mention of "Anti-cryptography".

What if one of the planets that has been recently discovered has a race of intelligent species that have electromagnetic communication system that can be received by Earth.  Anticryptography might be a process to determine what these space aliens are trying to tell us.  Likely it will simply be the process to communicate over the great interstellar space.  The race of intelligent beings might send, repeatedly, a primer of communications.  The receiver's capabilities can't be assumed, so sended ingenuity is the important part of the equation.

What would the primer look like?

To create a rudimentary programming language, all you need is about two dozen symbols. To do this, you need (source: Anticryptography: The Next Frontier in Computer Science by Brian McConnell): :

• Delimiting characters (e.g., "(", ")")
• Basic arithmetic operators (e.g., ADD, SUB, MULT, DIV)
• Boolean arithmetic and logic (e.g., TRUE, FALSE, AND, OR, NOT)
• Comparison operators (e.g., GT, GTE, LT, LTE, EQ, NEQ)
• Variables (e.g., STORE{n}, RECALL{n})
• Branching (e.g., JUMP{n}, GOSUB{n}, IF {x} DO {y})

How do you put this type of communications together.  Humans do this all of the time, but what would we use to do this?

 Stayed tuned, and keep your aluminum foil hats near by!