CHAPTER 891: CHAPTER 136: ANOTHER POSSIBILITY

"Clues? Clues, my foot." Ingrid shook her head and handed her notebook to Xiang Shan: "The computer has identified the most frequently occurring symbols, you can take a look yourself."

Ingrid’s notebook had ten... or rather three sets of different symbols. They were a solid circle, a hollow circle; four arrows pointing up, down, left, and right, with the main part of the arrow being an equilateral triangle followed by a line perpendicular to its base; and four arrows pointing diagonally, where the main part of each arrow was an isosceles right triangle with the most common base perpendicular to a line.

All of them were hand-drawn.

"What is this?"

"If I’m not mistaken, the solid circle and the hollow circle represent ’start’ and ’end’, respectively, while the ’arrows’ indicate ’reading direction’. In other words, these things can be read not only in left-right and up-down sequences but also in a diagonal sequence," Ingrid said.

Xiang Shan grinned: "How troublesome... doesn’t it make you dizzy?"

"Everyone guesses that these symbols are not a language but something like a high-level or assembly language."

Xiang Shan looked at the symbols: "So you think these things are... mnemonics? Or something like that?"

"Very likely." Ingrid nodded: "These things are highly pictorial. But if we were to evaluate them by the standards of ideograms, there would be too few characters, only a little over a hundred. However, by the standards of an alphabet, there are too many. Plus, such complex and difficult-to-guess symbols don’t really seem designed for aliens to read—of course, that is from a human perspective. The alien concept of language might be based on a completely different physiological foundation."

"Oh..."

"But ultimately, there are some ’things that if you study science, you will definitely understand’. First, draw a few geometric shapes, then draw a diagram of a hydrogen atom to indicate that we understand math and physics, and then label the number symbols, which is stronger than anything else," Ingrid continued.

Xiang Shan nodded: "Indeed."

"These symbols are intended for machines, not for living beings."

Xiang Shan thought for a moment: "Actually, not necessarily. I feel that these words could be mapped to a ’unique natural semantics’ in human vocabulary, with each symbol pointing to a ’clear concept’."

"Clear concept..."

"Registers, accumulators, memory, adding, sending to..." Xiang Shan waved his hand: "Of course, this is based on human computer technology. In reality, the computer architecture of aliens might have nothing to do with this. But concepts like ’add’, ’transfer’, ’offset’, etc., must still exist."

Ingrid quickly recorded this in her notebook: "Indeed..."

"And within them, their numeric symbols must be included. Have you found any symbols in there that are similar or identical to the ones marked on the steel beams outside?"

"The computer is counting; according to the current data, those symbols not only exist but aren’t few in number either."

"Have you figured out where ’0’ and ’1’ are?"

Ingrid shook her head: "Not confirmed yet, what’s up?"

"My guess is that there must be a section with many 0s and 1s... hmm, or perhaps 0/1/2—aliens might use ternary computers, but overall binary seems more likely," Xiang Shan said: "If it’s really as you think, that these symbols are akin to mnemonics, then there must exist a region that correlates the set of ’mnemonics’ with the set of ’machine instructions’ in some form." Xiang Shan said: "The machine must first be able to convert mnemonics into machine instructions to operate through these mnemonics."

Ingrid nodded: "Indeed, I should have thought of that—if there are any breakthroughs in the decryption, I’ll include you in the report. But why are you so sure about binary?"

"It relates to the question: ’In which base can we use the fewest symbols to represent the most numbers?’," Xiang Shan said: "For example, in the range ’0-99’, the binary representation of 99 is 1100011, a seven-digit number, so to express any number from 0 to 99, we prepare two states for each digit, which means seven 0s and seven 1s, a total of fourteen symbols. In ternary, 99 is, hmm, 10200, a five-digit number. To represent all numbers in this range, we need five 1s, five 2s, and five 0s. Quaternary requires sixteen symbols, quintal, sextal, and septal are fifteen symbols, eighteen symbols, and twenty-one symbols, respectively."

"If you extend ’0-99’ to ’any number’, you will find that the ’most efficient’ result falls on the natural logarithm e, that is, the base e is the most efficient. But e is not an integer; it’s an irrational number, close to 2.7182. At least in engineering needs, a base can only be a positive integer, so it’s either 2 or 3."

Ingrid nodded: "Then isn’t ternary better?"

"Purely from the perspective of information storage and calculation it’s not wrong," Xiang Shan sighed: "However, ’components with two states’ versus ’components with three states’, costs are different. The storage advantage of ternary over binary is relatively limited, perhaps just a few percent, but with current technology, the cost of ternary components is much higher than binary components, and the difficulty of integration is even more—of course, this is based on human understanding. Perhaps with aliens, it’s the opposite. But I think the physical laws of the Universe are consistent, so aliens should be the same."

Ingrid pondered for a moment: "Cost problem... but you see, you mentioned earlier that these aliens ’spare no cost’."

"Ah..." Xiang Shan was taken aback, clearly persuaded: "Makes a lot of sense..."

If those aliens truly adhered to a ’religious belief of approximating mathematical theory as closely as possible’...

During dinner, Ingrid and Xiang Shan relayed this conversation to Yawgmoth and David.

As a result, Yawgmoth rolled his eyes: "I won’t comment on the computer part, but the ’spare no cost’ part... have you ever considered another possibility? The Mother Planet of the Argon builders is very close to the Sun, extremely close, with abundant energy—and even the ocean is filled with organics formed from decomposed plants — it is a planet where even animals can photosynthesize. In such an incredibly resource-rich environment, their concept of ’resources’ must be different from ours."

Xiang Shan and Ingrid were immediately taken aback.

Yawgmoth pointed with his fork: "Anthropocentrists."

David seriously pondered for a moment: "In such an environment, can evolutionary pressures truly promote intelligent creatures? The optimal evolutionary strategy in such a place should be to expand leaf size as much as possible, right?"