Timeline for What would hinder the exploration of an alien outpost?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 15, 2015 at 20:41 | comment | added | jhoyla | That sentence is perfectly valid, and to a computer would certainly not cause any problems. For all you know Aliens do have 500 children and 499 spouses, adding cultural assumptions to your translation device clearly makes it worse. Of course, once you've identified the numbers putting them in order is a little trickier, but in general the smaller the number, the more frequently it's used, with some variation based on the base (so for humans we prefer to stick with multiples of 10). | |
| Mar 15, 2015 at 20:35 | comment | added | Mason Wheeler | @Jhoyla: We decided to go out, just the 500 of us, for a quiet, romantic dinner. You know, a simple night out, to get away from all the chaos at home. Get a babysitter to watch our 500 kids for an hour or 500... | |
| Mar 15, 2015 at 20:30 | comment | added | jhoyla | That's much less of an issue now, computers can do statistical analyses in the blink of an eye that can extract meaning from a language that has never been seen before. For example it can tell you how words relate to each other, and attempt to tag words based on apparent function. From there you can derive similar words by how they are used. For example in most human languages all numbers are used in very similar contexts (i.e. anywhere 2 can be used, so can 500). With a large enough block of English and a large enough unrelated block of Chinese you can build a rudimentary translation engine. | |
| Mar 13, 2015 at 20:43 | comment | added | Mason Wheeler | If I managed to get it powered up without frying it, I'd get a team of linguists, physicists and computer scientists to look at it and try to figure out what it does, though in all honesty I wouldn't have too much of a hope for success. The term "Rosetta Stone" has achieved iconic, metaphorical significance for a reason: that was literally what it took to figure out ancient Egyptian script! After the best linguists in the world spent decades beating their heads against the language fruitlessly, they only made progress when a translation key was essentially handed to them on a silver platter. | |
| Mar 13, 2015 at 20:41 | comment | added | Mason Wheeler | @CausticHarmony: Very carefully. First, I would ensure that it's powered down, to the best of my ability to determine so, and then transport it to an isolated environment inside a mil-spec Faraday cage. Then I'd try to determine if it has an internal battery or requires external power, and try to figure out how to turn it on. (This might be non-obvious to an outsider; just consider modern power adapters where the volts/amps/hz/etc specs are clearly written in plain English on a sticker on the back of the "brick".) (more) | |
| Mar 13, 2015 at 20:15 | comment | added | CausticHarmony | Nice suggestion, thank you! The comparison with the unexploded bomb is really something. Maybe we should put some more thought into the idea of 'cannot interact since you don't know it' but also the reverse would be true: if you don't interact with it you won't learn something. But you cannot just start pressing all the switches of course. So how could one even start? | |
| Mar 13, 2015 at 18:50 | history | answered | Mason Wheeler | CC BY-SA 3.0 |