Attracting Alien Life

[DougShrapnel]

I don't know if seti still uses Pi to show whomever might be listening in the universe that we are intelligent. But would it make as much if not more sense to beem out that we understand evolution. It is not possible for any intelligence to not come from any other process. I would also like to hear from the theists on this on. Leave a message of Pi, or evolution?

[Borodog]

Pi is easier to encode.

[DougShrapnel]

[ QUOTE ]
Pi is easier to encode.

[/ QUOTE ]I had thought of that, even tho I didn't have a great idea to encode it, I figured it would be possible. Do you think there would be any significant difference between intelligent life that understands evolution, vs an intelligent life that understood pi but not evolution? Which type of life would you wish to get in contact with?

[arahant]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Pi is easier to encode.

[/ QUOTE ]I had thought of that, even tho I didn't have a great idea to encode it, I figured it would be possible. Do you think there would be any signifigant difference between intelligent life that understand evolution, vs an intelligent life that understood pi but not evolution? Which type of life would you wish to get in contact with?

[/ QUOTE ]

Pi is simple...you just send out the binary or something. I have no idea how you could communicate that we appreciate evolution (in the biological sense). You'd need to encode the entire language, as well as facts about life on earth. Much harder to DECODE, too.

I find it unlikely that we would contact an intelligence that was capable of receiving and understanding the signals, and wouldn't understand evolution. That said, I don't think it matters whether they do or not. I guess i'd rather not have to deal with more creationist aliens. Could start an intergalactic war or something.

[Borodog]

I just thought of how to do both. If you've read Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, you'll recall the WEASEL program. Start with a random string of characters, and permute randomly mutated "daughter" strings by randomly altering a character somewhere in the string. Compare all the daughters to the target phrase "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL" and keep only the one that is closest to the target. Repeat. After a small number of generations, you will have converged to the target phrase.

Do the same thing, but with pi. Off the top of my head I don't know anything about binary representations for decimal fractions, so I'll just make one up. A good approximation of pi is 355/113 (try it). We can represent this by a string like "101100011:01110001".

Start with a random string like "111010100:110001011" and generate daughter strings from it by randomly "mutating" points along the string. Choose only the one that is closest to the target string, and repeat.

This is a relatively simple algorithm. I imagine that it would have to be done and encoded "graphically", something like this:

http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c153/Borodog/piweasel.gif

You could just keep repeating it with different random starting strings and different random daughters, all ending up with the code for pi.

[arahant]

lol...this actually seems pretty elegant to me in some way. It's a really neat way of combining the topics.

Practically speaking, though...pi has gotta be easier /images/graemlins/smile.gif.

Also, we are still left with converting this 'mathematical' evolution into biological terms...i'm sure our creationist friends accept your algorithm without conceding evolution. Also, there may be an issue in having to send a 1-dimensional string of information. Now you need to encode the dimensions too...

I'm sure you can make this more elegant, but I just don't have the energy any more /images/graemlins/smile.gif.

[DougShrapnel]

Cool, boro. That's a elegant way of doing it, and I'm impressed. Pi is cool and all but if you want to attract qualitiy intelligence it might pay to spare a little effort to really drive home the point that we are worth spending the effort to get to.

I started this thread hoping to at least snare a literalist theist or two into defending a position that understanding evolution isn't truely a sign of intelligence. More so then Pi. However, I'm very pleased with the direction it went itstead.

[madnak]

[ QUOTE ]
Cool, boro. That's a elegant way of doing it, and I'm impressed.

[/ QUOTE ]

[BigBuffet]

What about the Fibonacci Golden Spiral?