The Tech Thread

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The Tech Thread

Post by Artemis »

A database and hashing-out forum for commonly-used tech - basically a tool for us to set up a more solid tech-level for ourselves.

I'll start this off with a little invention I call...

Mudar - MUlti-spectrum Detection, Analysis, and Rangefinding

The basic device used for taking a look at the space around your starship, space station, moon or planet. An evolution of radar, mudar incorporates not only radio and microwaves but most of the known electromagnetic spectrum. Coupled with a reasonably powerful computer network, mudar can combine readings in multiple spectra of light into a single cohesive reading, can compensate for the "rainbow effect" of diffraction through stellar gas and dust clouds, and can even make reasonable predictions as to where a target actually is, as opposed to where it's "dead light" signature says it is. It can even be used as a last-ditch defensive weapon, as its emitters can be juiced up to spew enough radiation to fry the computer brains of most fighters or the crew of a hostile landing craft. This is one of the first tricks a merchant ship learns when passing through sketchy territory.
"The universe's most essential beauty is its endlessness. There is room and resources enough for all of us. Whether there is room for all of our passions is the question, and the problem that we work tirelessly to find a solution to."

-Qhameio Allir Nlafahn, Commonwealth ambassador, during the signing of the Kriolon Treaty.
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Re: The Tech Thread

Post by Malchus »

Well, this is from what I proposed in the Worldbuilding thread.

Translator technology

Translator systems are devices that have vastly simplified versions of languages (removing colloquialisms and other such annoying causes of lexical ambiguity) stored into them. A speaker inputs a simplified version of his native language into it, and it renders that in a simplified version of the target language before transmitting and vice versa. Depending on the quality of the device and the syntax of the other language, the translated renderings would be almost pidgin-like. This make communication between two species using said devices rather slow since there is a significant lag (a sentence or two at least) to give time for the translation process. There is also the added complication of having to simplify what one says into said translators since they are often incapable of handling more complex forms of the language.

When it comes to previously un-encountered or not-previously-programmed-in languages, the translation device has some sort of Language Acquisition Device to handle the acquisition of said new language. The LAD, however, only workds if the other translation device it interfaces with also has a LAD or a similar mechanism itself. The two translation devices then turn into what are essentially simultaneous teacher-learners. They would initially send simple snippets and samples of languages to each other before moving on to more complex forms until they are finally able to communicate with each other--essentially an accelerated version of the entire language learning and teaching process.

Of course, these are still very limited and even the most advanced of such mechanisms are nothing to a properly trained living interpreter. However, since interpreters are in limited numbers, most inter-species communication has to get by with such translation devices.
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Re: The Tech Thread

Post by Destructionator »

I'm thinking about translations for a short story I'm working on. I think I'm hitting a problem with easy translation: the language acquisition device doesn't seem like it would be useful for a first contact situation because the other guy probably won't have a compatible device. Any ideas on how to compensate for that?
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Re: The Tech Thread

Post by Malchus »

Well, in that case I'd think they'd start with something along the lines of Lincos. Basically, establishing some initial rudimentary communication through basic math and language symbols, then theoretically building up from that. Maybe, after a long while, there's enough understanding to instruct the other guy on how to build their own LAD.
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Re: The Tech Thread

Post by Blackwing »

Honestly Destructionator's hit on the point why an automatic language exchange system doesn't really work:

Incompatibility.

In order for two computer systems to communicate they need to send signals in the same way (if one race uses communications lasers and the other uses radio waves, you're already out of luck). Then the computers need to be speaking the same (digital) language.

They also have to be speaking about the same thing. If one of them 'asks' "What is your word for home?" while the other expects the question "Who rules your empire?", then you're already getting language confusion right there.

Not that that would even happen, because computers can exchange things like text, sounds, video or any other informations unless they're using the same file type, which considering they're built by two different species who never agreed on a common file type is extremely, extremely unlikely.

So yes, translation computers are utterly useless in first contact situations and there is no way to ever change this.
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Re: The Tech Thread

Post by Destructionator »

Malchus wrote:Maybe, after a long while, there's enough understanding to instruct the other guy on how to build their own LAD.
Perhaps what they should do is offer up a LAD or two in the initial kit you send to someone for the first time. If they have two of them and can see them train each other in some languages, perhaps that can give them a kickstart on how to teach the device their own language, using the manual method you linked to and/or an idea I'll describe at the bottom of this post.

After they've worked through the process manually with the first one, that one device can go around and teach everyone else.

Perhaps polities would send out probes through all the graveddies they know about, probes like the one we sent out with the picture of the man and the woman and the record and all that stuff, but their's would include a pair translation devices, with the hope that someone finding it would figure out their meaning and get a head start in the slow learning process.
Blackwing wrote:Not that that would even happen, because computers can exchange things like text, sounds, video or any other informations unless they're using the same file type, which considering they're built by two different species who never agreed on a common file type is extremely, extremely unlikely.
Since they speak languages to people, we can assume they have a speaker and microphone at least, so exchanging sound will be easy enough. If they have a little projector or a screen as well, they can use it to exchange pictures.

Since not everyone would use spoken language, the projector would be useful for translating sign languages too.

When manually teaching the device, I figure a projector would be necessary to get anything done as far as general language goes. It displays pictures of vocab words and waits for you to say the word. Then it moves on to displaying actions and expects you to use sentences, showing the same thing with different pictures to rule out mistakes and figure out the sentence structure.

It finally tests its understanding by showing a picture and speaking a sentence back to you. It would probably never quite understand the whole language, but with enough time, I can see it becoming good enough to really help accelerate the process.

Then people translators take the simple language put out by the device and figure out what it actually means with context. If it says "hold your fire", the 'living translator', who doesn't know the language (he listens to the device's translation), but knows the context, would have the job of determining if that meant "don't shoot" or "hang onto that burning object".

I think this is clunky, but workable, assuming the receiving party takes the time to analyze the LAD gift he got and actually understands what it is trying to do.
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Marle: Lucca! You're amazing!
Lucca: Ain't it the truth! ... Oh, um...I mean...
Marle: Enough with the false modesty! You have a real gift! I would trade my royal ancestry for your genius in a heartbeat!

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Re: The Tech Thread

Post by Malchus »

Blackwing wrote:Honestly Destructionator's hit on the point why an automatic language exchange system doesn't really work:

Incompatibility.

In order for two computer systems to communicate they need to send signals in the same way (if one race uses communications lasers and the other uses radio waves, you're already out of luck). Then the computers need to be speaking the same (digital) language.
True, but by this point there's already enough trade and contact (centuries worth, at least) within the two respective galaxies that most polities should have some translation system based on the others everyone else is using in the same galaxy. Since I doubt there are that many translators to go around, such systems would still be useful for regular business and whatnot. And since not all models come installed with all languages in one given galaxy, then the LAD could still be useful for learning other languages within said galaxy at least since, by this point, most of translation systems in the Milky Way will have been built to the same specs and thus compatible.

But for first contact beyond that, without the LAD, then yeah the translator systems are useless. For first contact with those without the LAD or any other compatible system, then you'll need something far more rudimentary. I think Destructionator's post after yours hits it right on the head for first contact scenarios.
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Re: The Tech Thread

Post by Blackwing »

With regards to sending sound and images you have to realize the sheer amount of encoding that goes into a sound file.

Just to show you what will likely happen when one race tries to communicate with another race in space:

Burn a video file on a modern writable dvd and configure another pc to read the output from a 19th century gramophone player.
Now put the dvd in the gramophone player. Does the second computer receive the video file properly?

Now you may say 'that makes no sense, a gramophone player is meant to play sound, not video' and I'll grant you that, but for all we know one of the aliens is indeed sending video while the others are expecting to receive audio.

But to be fair we'll use a video receiver instead. Hook up the second computer to an old beta-max player this time.
Insert the dvd into.. wait the dvd doesn't even fit into the beta-max player properly.

And that's another possibility, that aliens species one sends a signal that aliens species two isn't even equipped to properly receive. The beta-max play gives no signal at all, even though you're giving it video input.
The gramophone player from the previous example may not have given any useful output, but at least it generated SOME output, the beta-max player generates no output at all (beyond static).

At any rate, a video file is nothing more than a large amount of binary data ordered in such a way that video playing programme can convert that data into a video. If you try to open the data in any other kind of programme, you'll already get gibberish or static, now imagine if the computer system you're trying to run it on doesn't even use binary data.
You can't simply send aliens a video file and expect them to be able to read it, if they can then, in computer terms at least, they're already speaking the same language as you are (and they're using something like C++ or JAVA, which is amazing in and of itself.)

More examples: set up a programme that converts ASCII codes into text. Now take a Morse Code book and send a message to it in Morse code (assume for a second that Morse code is binary, you can even assume that a 'dit' is a zero and a 'dah' is a 1. Others will say that conventionally a 'dit' is a 1 and that 'dah' is three 1s, but that is yet another different communication problem). Does the ASCII programme produce text? Probably. Is that text anywhere near what you wanted to send? Not a chance.

Now for added fun try replying in chinese (as in convert a chinese message into binary based on ASCII code and then convert the binary code back using your Morse codebook... Again we aren't even close. It's incredibly unlikely that either of your two messages will yield even one single intelligible English word...

And you might argue that you can configure your computer to recognise Morse code and indeed you can... but Morse code is at the very least a type of code we know of and can use, now imagine encountering a code that you don't know, that doesn't resemble any code ever conceived by humans and that is, just for fun, transmitted through pheromones. Good luck setting up a computer to crack that one.

You have to realize that any modern computer file, including video and audio files use compression algorithms to compress vast amounts of data into something smaller so that your 100 gig hard drive doesn't fill up from trying to store 30 seconds of completely uncompressed film.

In order to use a computer to communicate with an alien race even on a very rudimentary level you need to have a computer that can:

a. Recognise that something, be it a beam of light, a radio wave of any frequency or anything else is a signal and at the same time whether anything .

b. To recognise what kind of code, if any, that signal uses (binary? trinary? Some kind of code that doesn't rely on numbers?)

c. A lot of other steps and checks and whatnot

d. Eventually produce something intelligible.

In essence, a translation computer will almost never be any use in a first contact situation, because it is very freaking unlikely that it will be able to receive, let alone understand what the other is trying to communicate.

Usually when someone thinks of 'soft' science, they think of plasma cannons and FTL drives and whatnot, but the real hallmarks of soft science fiction isn't super weapons, energy shields that can ward off almost any attack and propulsion systems capable of such speeds that light commits suicide after encountering it and developing the mother of all inferiority complexes.
The real hallmark of soft science fiction is the idea that in this vast and expansive universe, sentient species will, eventually, all travel the stars, encounter each other and somehow be compatible enough to not only recognize each others' sentience but also be able to eventually communicate on some level and be able to even convey a message.

A soft science writer asks itself 'what gas does the species breathe?'.

A hard science writer asks itself 'does the organism even have anything that could to some extent or another be broadly considered to be somehow remotely analogous to the process we refer to as breathing?'

That's why no one ever (truly) writes a hard science fiction story with aliens in it, it would be enormously interesting, but only when it explores the myriad ways in which these aliens are so very, very different from us and that gets in the way of intergalactic wars and politicking and whatnot and robs the story of all the drama, action, comedy, romance and everything else that makes an intergalactic community so appealing.
Nevertheless whenever a writer or a group of writers decides that their story should be 'hard science' the first thing they do is throw out the FTL drives and hand held particle beams, but they hardly ever evict the humanoid aliens or the concept that aliens communicate in some way even remotely understandable by humans.

Note: I'm not saying that Translators and LADs are a bad idea, they're just ten times softer science than the average FTL drive will ever be. This is a good thing, since we're world builders and worlds need people to be interesting.
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Re: The Tech Thread

Post by Mobius 1 »

You seem to assume the sound or video file is being directly transmitted to your target's computer. It's obviously nothing of the sort, the sounds and videos are for the benefit of the individuals, not the computers. You've just creating one fat red herring for something that, while complex a topic, is most likely not as hard as you make it.

Point is, granted the species meet under peaceful terms and not under the silly 'immediate misunderstanding = war' scenario, given a few years, something of a rudimentary go-between can be worked out.

Anyway, the point is moot. This verse has been established for a couple hundred years, with the various alien species already in contact with one another. By then, it's almost assured (considering the obvious galactic 'peace' - peace being a relative term, most species have not tried to kill the others on sight, or else 'galactic civilization' wouldn't exist in the first place) that some form of pidgin or computer translator has been worked out. We, as a culture, tend to underestimate how much change can come about in a few hundred years.
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Re: The Tech Thread

Post by Destructionator »

Blackwing wrote:With regards to sending sound and images you have to realize the sheer amount of encoding that goes into a sound file.
You don't send a sound file (though this isn't necessarily difficult*), you just send sound. I'm assuming they are pretty close to face to face, or at least the person is holding his translation device in his hand, so it can just use its speaker to talk to him.

This is another reason to simply give someone a translation device in any first contact scenario though: by giving him one of yours, you know your own device will be able to understand its signals.

The actual communication with the alien though uses an analog speaker and maybe a light projector, not a digital signal.

This does, of course assume they have eyes and ears similar to ours. If not, it is naturally going to be a new challenge.

* The .wav file format, for example, is quite trivial. It is simply a header and then a list of amplitudes for the sound that you read at a rate of x bytes per second. Someone analyzing the data should be able to figure out it is sound by looking at the patterns in the data and be able to play it without much difficulty. (Though he might not get the timing right.) MP3 would certainly be harder though.
Note: I'm not saying that Translators and LADs are a bad idea, they're just ten times softer science than the average FTL drive will ever be.
That's an exaggeration. Communication, unlike FTL, is a solvable problem. It won't be super easy, but it, at least, can be done.
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Re: The Tech Thread

Post by Destructionator »

Mobius 1 wrote:Anyway, the point is moot. This verse has been established for a couple hundred years, with the various alien species already in contact with one another.
The reason I asked is I'm working on a small story that is the introduction of my polity to the galactic stage. I figure the first communication early on would be between the rocket scientists - that thing coming toward us, is it on a threatening trajectory?

If no, the hard part is: what next? There's only so much meaning a conversation consisting of only course adjustments can have, so moving on something more relatively quickly is desired story-wise. I'm thinking the galactic player sending a 'welcome package' including a LAD is the best way to go about that. (Optionally with an 18 MONTHS LATER jump to handwave the difficulty in initially training it.)
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Marle: Lucca! You're amazing!
Lucca: Ain't it the truth! ... Oh, um...I mean...
Marle: Enough with the false modesty! You have a real gift! I would trade my royal ancestry for your genius in a heartbeat!

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Re: The Tech Thread

Post by Malchus »

Mobius 1 wrote: Anyway, the point is moot. This verse has been established for a couple hundred years, with the various alien species already in contact with one another. By then, it's almost assured (considering the obvious galactic 'peace' - peace being a relative term, most species have not tried to kill the others on sight, or else 'galactic civilization' wouldn't exist in the first place) that some form of pidgin or computer translator has been worked out. We, as a culture, tend to underestimate how much change can come about in a few hundred years.
^ This.

The major species within the same galaxy have been tooling around space for centuries, at the very least, with enough contact for widespread trade and diplomacy. Long enough to work out some standardized translation system. And, note, I never said such systems were those perfect translators you see in Star Trek. Most of them fall under these following conditions:

1.) What you say into the translators need to be vastly simplified. Instead of "We mean you no ill will, hold your fire." you'd likely have to say "We not hostile. Don't shoot." To make it easier for the translators. And there's still a lag of a sentence or more as it translates.

2.) Given the above, most translators will be pidgin at best. This is not unfeasible. Hell, Yoiu input some very simplified (just the most basic gist, no colloquialisms and whatnot) phrases into Babelfish and you'll get some sort of pidgin translation, and Babelfish is generally horrible. This is centuries into the future, and I'm sure the translation systems have something far better to work with than babelfish.

3.) The LAD only works if the other side you're talking to also has a LAD, as I mentioned before. And even as the LADs learn, it ain't a quick process. They have to go at it for hours before some halfway decent translation can result.
If no, the hard part is: what next? There's only so much meaning a conversation consisting of only course adjustments can have, so moving on something more relatively quickly is desired story-wise. I'm thinking the galactic player sending a 'welcome package' including a LAD is the best way to go about that. (Optionally with an 18 MONTHS LATER jump to handwave the difficulty in initially training it.)
I would think that for a first contact scenario, the most likely attempt at initial communication would be very simple light and radio pulses (and I'm sure it shouldn't be hard to pick those up) broadcasting some very simple "language" of basic math and logic concepts. You'd then move up to something more visual (brighter more complex light pulses, something). Then the whole welcome package with instructions for the LAD after some time (about 18 months or more sounds about right), when some very simple future version of essentially Morse code has established some crude dialogue.
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Re: The Tech Thread

Post by Czernobog »

Quantum Computing

Quantum computing is de rigeur for the more advanced polities, including Starkland, giving them a big advantage in research and having a nigh-infinite number of applications.Once large and bulky, quantum computers are now available to the common citizen, although they have a higher price in money than microchip computers. They have unimaginable processing power, and are very good when using virtuo-gaming, as they can 'dream' code as fast as a gamer can play, creating an effortless and utterly realistic simulation.

It is for this reason that they are commonly used for training purposes in military applications, being so realistic that it is hard to tell the difference between the simulation and real life. Other simulations, as well as having a poor record when simulating dangerous situations. Perhaps the biggest achievement of quantum computing is the so-called 'cybernet', which links all of Starkland together, with relays going through the graveddies, binding the whole of Starkland together. It can also be used for nigh-uncrackable encryption, which can only be cracked by another quantum computer, giving a vast strategic advantage to a polity that has them over one that does not.
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