Artificial Intelligence: What about space aliens and the software to communicate with them?

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Ok, I should do a nice table here to show how C# compares to LISP, but I got off track reading science fiction related to space alien communications.  

To get some ideas on intelligence and especially space alien intelligence, I went to Minsky, he wrote an interesting article on alien intelligence, asking questions such as: Would we be able to communicate with them, and if we can, how would we communicate with them?  

Let's start off with the simple stuff: Are the aliens too advance to understand us?  Minsky maintains that is unlikely, since evolution always starts with the simple changes and stops when it reaches a solution.  Then he states that humans solve problems by being goal oriented and so it is logical that space aliens would solve problems by being goal oriented and using symbols to represent objects (object oriented programming?).  Minsky makes the case much more clearly by writting:

ECONOMICS: Every intelligence must develop symbol-systems for representing objects, causes and goals, and for formulating and remembering the procedures it develops for achieving those goals.

SPARSENESS: Every evolving intelligence will eventually encounter certain very special ideas–e.g., about arithmetic, causal reasoning, and economics–because these particular ideas are very much simpler than other ideas with similar uses.

This means that to communicate with them, you have to send the tools for communications to the aliens first, in this case software.  To accomplish this a language was created: LINCOS, see: https://lifeboat.com/ex/alien.shield, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_(language) for more information. 

The LINCOS is a simple language that CosmicOS which looks a lot the computer language scheme evolved from.  I like the concept of CosmicOS, and I think I am going to work it into a game for the XBox 360. 

The players would have to be able to create an arithmetic and then use to communicate with the other players.  Oh wait a minute, that is what a lot of the artificial intelligence do in games.  Well in future articles I will take a look at the messaging in game AI. 

 Finally, in case you do meet up with space aliens, you might want to use the protocols set up by SETI, you can find these at: https://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=179287.