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Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?

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Re: Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?

#41

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

crdb wrote: post #29
extr wrote: post #8

If anyone hasn't read the short story that Arrival is based on, definitely check it out, it's called "Story of Your Life". Ted Chiang is a fantastic SciFi writer and I was very excited (worried?) that this particular story was chosen for a film adaption, as it doesn't seem to lend itself well to the medium. But based on early feedback I'm optimistic. Not sure how closely the movie follows the short story's plot, but…

I disliked the story for the same reason I dislike a lot of modern SF (and arts generally): it is nihilist and depressing. The craftsmanship is good , although not great (the split structure feels a bit forced, for example). To use one's skill like this is... sad. The grandmaster of depressing SF was PKD. Story of Your Life left me with the same feeling of hopelessness and sadness as Ubik, which itself demonstrates g…

I'm unfamiliar with the original story, but watched the film yesterday. I was very impressed. Intelligent, emotional, sensitive - I certainly didn't come away thinking of it as nihilist and depressing, quite the opposite.

Re: Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?

#42

Post by simonh »

joering2 wrote: post #12
adriand wrote: post #6

Interesting post. But I wonder if the focus on how we would communicate with aliens makes sense. In the case of this movie, they arrived here, apparently. If they're that much more technologically advanced than we are, wouldn't they be taking the lead on communicating with us? They'd probably have a substantial set of templates for how to communicate with primitive civilizations developed already.

Not necessarily. We sent man to the moon but can we communicate with Ants?

If we did (and we do understand a fair bit about chemical trails and contact signals), would the ants even know they were communicating with something that isn't another ant free m the same colony? Do they even have a mental model of other ants or even their own colony?

Re: Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?

#44

Post by crdb »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #41
crdb wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disliked the story for the same reason I dislike a lot of modern SF (and arts generally): it is nihilist and depressing. The craftsmanship is good , although not great (the split structure feels a bit forced, for example). To use one's skill like this is... sad. The grandmaster of depressing SF was PKD. Story of Your Life left me with the same feeling of hopelessness and sadness as Ubik, which itself demonstrates g…

I'm unfamiliar with the original story, but watched the film yesterday. I was very impressed. Intelligent, emotional, sensitive - I certainly didn't come away thinking of it as nihilist and depressing, quite the opposite.

I haven't watched it yet. It's months away, I think January release here. Other commenters say the plot has been substantially changed.

After watching Dr. Strange I read the first 5-6 comics, because I thought it was one of the few Marvel characters with some depth and interesting ideas, whose source material might be worth exploring. Alas, a goateed bad guy appears in dreams, wafting around, then getting beaten in a punch up with the hero because "magic", repeat ad infinitum. A far cry from the special interaction of Cumberbatch, Swinton and Mikkelson with a great script we saw in cinemas (I might be biased since this is the closest to a movie adaptation of Stross' Laundry Files ideas that we're likely to see in the near future).

A good writer and director can take any idea and turn it into something interesting, so I am looking forward to discovering the movie. My original comment was targeted at the story only.

Re: Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?

#45

Post by daveguy »

venomsnake wrote: post #30
kybernetyk wrote: post #22

I't funny that so many people assume intelligent beings who build space ships capable of interstellar travel would need our help with understanding human language.

Honest question - how fast can we train AI to know language?

Currently we can't train AI to know language. We can train very poor translations with many existing examples of translations (see Google translate). The translation is a crude mapping from one word string to the other and does poorly in general to convey meaning.

With a completely novel language there is virtually no technique to train AI to know the language.

Re: Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?

#47

Post by schoen »

_greim_ wrote: post #14
adriand wrote: post #6

Interesting post. But I wonder if the focus on how we would communicate with aliens makes sense. In the case of this movie, they arrived here, apparently. If they're that much more technologically advanced than we are, wouldn't they be taking the lead on communicating with us? They'd probably have a substantial set of templates for how to communicate with primitive civilizations developed already.

The answer to this is a spoiler. (Gur nyvraf' checbfr ba Rnegu vf gb grnpu hf gurve ynathntr. Vg'f fhpu na nqinaprq ynathntr gung bapr lbh yrnea gb guvax va vg, lbh tnva gur novyvgl gb rkcrevrapr gvzr aba-yvarneyl. Gur nyvraf jnag uhznavgl gb havgr, yrnea gur ynathntr naq tnva guvf cbjre, fvapr, rkcrevrapvat gvzr aba-yvarneyl gurzfryirf, gurl'ir creprvirq fbzr pngnpylfz uhznavgl pna/jvyy fnir gurz sebz va gur qvfgnag…

Interestingly, the "nyvraf' checbfr" part of this is an innovation of the movie that is explicitly not present in Ted Chiang's story.

Re: Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?

#48

Post by lobster_johnson »

crdb wrote: post #29
extr wrote: post #8

If anyone hasn't read the short story that Arrival is based on, definitely check it out, it's called "Story of Your Life". Ted Chiang is a fantastic SciFi writer and I was very excited (worried?) that this particular story was chosen for a film adaption, as it doesn't seem to lend itself well to the medium. But based on early feedback I'm optimistic. Not sure how closely the movie follows the short story's plot, but…

I disliked the story for the same reason I dislike a lot of modern SF (and arts generally): it is nihilist and depressing. The craftsmanship is good , although not great (the split structure feels a bit forced, for example). To use one's skill like this is... sad. The grandmaster of depressing SF was PKD. Story of Your Life left me with the same feeling of hopelessness and sadness as Ubik, which itself demonstrates g…

Have you read any Iain M. Banks? While his books are often bleak ("Use of Weapons" and "Consider Phlebas" and "Against a Dark Background" in particular), and he has a fondness for dark humour and irony (both dramatic and linguistic), they never wander into nihilist territory, and are firmly on the side of humanism and progressiveness in general. He is (or was) also usually a great craftsman.

Re: Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?

#49

Post by theoh »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #31
disssonant wrote: post #5

Oh, but the polygonal "analysis" overlayed on that circular splotch with the drip marks as an alien's "handwriting" example is corny beyond words. Correlating an arbitrary set of points on splashy drippy smears, and eureka! It's a symbol for the global landing sites across seven continents? Yeah right. That leap in counter-intuitive conceptualization is on the level of bat shark repellant, or Roland Emerich's super c…

> Roland Emerich's super computer viruses for alien spaceships A (unfortunately) deleted scene explains this; our computers are based on reverse-engineered alien technology. We're both effectively running the same architecture.

Hmm, architecture can mean two things: general structure (e.g. Harvard, Von Neumann etc.) or specific machine type (i386, ARM4). It's plausible that we would have the same architecture in the first sense but not in the second (where we have seen great diversity and evolution).

Re: Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?

#50

Post by sc4th1s »

crdb wrote: post #29
extr wrote: post #8

If anyone hasn't read the short story that Arrival is based on, definitely check it out, it's called "Story of Your Life". Ted Chiang is a fantastic SciFi writer and I was very excited (worried?) that this particular story was chosen for a film adaption, as it doesn't seem to lend itself well to the medium. But based on early feedback I'm optimistic. Not sure how closely the movie follows the short story's plot, but…

I disliked the story for the same reason I dislike a lot of modern SF (and arts generally): it is nihilist and depressing. The craftsmanship is good , although not great (the split structure feels a bit forced, for example). To use one's skill like this is... sad. The grandmaster of depressing SF was PKD. Story of Your Life left me with the same feeling of hopelessness and sadness as Ubik, which itself demonstrates g…

Ubik as sad or hopeless?

Nah man, the end of ubik was just him leveling up.

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