Over at the UK Telegraph, journalists have been talking with programmers over at the Leeds Metropolitan University about a computer program being written to analyze an incoming signal from outer space to determine if it’s audio, video, or raw text. And, if it’s a language being sent, put a syntax to it to start the process of translating it to something that humans can understand.
According to the programmer, of the 60 languages on Earth that have been evaluated to write this program, all of them have a syntax which is mathematically similar. Adjectives are near nouns; functional terms that bracket phrases. Like “if” and “but” (which, when you think about it, are merely linguistic methods of describing mathematical or logical concepts.) “If these, then this, else that” and “This but not that.”
It sounds a lot like the kind of code breaking that was done during World War II, and if the Germans had possessed something like this back then, they might have realized that the Navajo language used as a code by the Allied forces was in fact a language and not a code…
Likewise, if this program works as described, if we ever discover life in outer space, the odds are that this will help us to decipher what they are saying.
Who would have guessed that all of the imagination that went in to Star Trek would one day bear fruit in reality?
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That’s pretty cool, but it assumes that alien language has analogues to our concepts. Despite some skepticism, I’m interested in hearing how it does.
(I wonder if they tested it by feeding it a language it doesn’t already know and evaluated it to see if it could translate it. If not, that sounds like a good test… maybe try Catalan or ancient Mayan or something else.)