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[spoiler] Also, the story clearly has a theme of a person being a helpless observer of their own life (prescience or not (see Gwern's post [0]). The movie has a time-travel twist that's very, to use an indian term, "masala". [0] https://www.gwern.net/Story%20Of%20Your%20Life
I'm intrigued by this use of "masala", can you explain? Urban dictionary has a few options, not sure which of those you mean, if any.
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By your comment it seems like you didn't watch Arrival. Maybe I'm misinterpreting that, if so please ignore. The whole point of Arrival was that we had to learn the alien language. The purpose of their arrival was to teach us their language so we could help them in the future. Had the purpose of the aliens been to spread the knowledge of their culture then it may have made sense for them to analyze and learn our lang…
I think the OP's point still stands. If aliens are traveling the universe teaching their language, you'd think they would have developed a curriculum , no? In pretty much every alien encounter movie it's the humans working out a plan for communication from scratch. You'd think the aliens would put a little more effort into it, especially if they've been spacefaring for years. And if they haven't, wouldn't they be a l…
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I can try to shine a light on this idiom. Masala is a popular indian dish here in the US... so popular in fact that it is expected at any indian restaurant. Because of this, the term can be synonomous with 'run of the mill', 'standard', or even 'safe'.
>Masala is a popular indian dish here in the US... Huh? Masala just means the dish uses a bunch of spices (ie masala chai is just tea with cardamom, maybe pepper and cinnamon and other things depending on whose making). I'm pretty sure regarding film its used to say a "standard movie" or even "boring", thats been "spiced" to taste better, with spices being a set of tropes that most people like.
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seemed like joke not a criticism. I laughed.
The author is arguing that stance, quite strongly, in another comment.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13971010
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For what it is worth, numbers are not necessarily a 'universal concept'. One of the most talked about examples is Piraha[0], a language which doesn't really represent numbers. This is interesting because a study done by Everett and Frank[1] shows that this can actually have effects on cognition, providing some evidence for the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis[3] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language [1] http:/…
The Piraha language is probably inadequate for developing interstellar travel. As was English hundreds of years ago. You need numbers, and names for concepts like energy, mass, momentum, and time.
Given that there is so much of physics that we have yet to understand (assuming what we think to be true is actually true), and given the infinite possibilities of what forms alien life could take, you can't make any assumptions about what sort of language they'd have. This was a point they briefly tried to make in the movie.
It's also worth making the distinction between the movie and the impressive short story that the movie is based on, which the article completely fails to mention: Ted Chiang - Story of Your Life [1] I've read Chiang's book about two years before the movie aired and it really is top-notch speculative fiction that I highly recommend to any Sci-Fi lover. Even though Denis Villeneuve, Eric Heisserer and Ted Chiang himsel…
What bothered me the most is that the way they start the "conversation" with the aliens is by using names and human concepts (walking, eating, etc.). I'm not a trained linguist or anything, but it seems to me they should start with concepts that are universal: mainly numbers. Maybe as a CS guy I'm biased (since my language is symbols and numbers), but literally every conceivable language has to contain numbers of som…
I'm a layman in this space but I've been thinking about the idea of numbers a lot, mainly for fictional world-building, how aliens may use them, and wondering if they really are universal.. One of the things that strikes me, is how we just started with integers and then tried to fit everything into them. I mean they're fine for counting , but kind of a hackjob for measuring . Like sure, integers may exist in reality…
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I'm a layman in this space but I've been thinking about the idea of numbers a lot, mainly for fictional world-building, how aliens may use them, and wondering if they really are universal.. One of the things that strikes me, is how we just started with integers and then tried to fit everything into them. I mean they're fine for counting , but kind of a hackjob for measuring . Like sure, integers may exist in reality…
Riemannian geometry is a geometry on differentiable structures (manifolds) equipped with a "metric tensor" that generalizes the idea of a length to curved shapes. Symplectic geometry is, similarly, a geometry on differentiable manifolds equipped with a "symplectic form" that generalizes the oriented area spanned by two vectors known in flat structures as the determinant. Now here's the fun part: Riemannian geometry m…
So a funny thing happened. When my eyes first skimmed over that part, I spotted the word "donut". When I read it a second later, it wasn't there.
Something in my brain literally substituted "donut" for "circle-shaped hole" to the extent that it appeared in my vision, for a single processing cycle.
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You could totally do this. We tend to deal numbers by turning them into symbol sequences and then applying grammatical rules to them --- we're good at grammar, we have hardware acceleration for it. Digital computers work the same way: the quantity is measured, turned into a number, turned into a symbol sequence, then we manipulate those symbols before turning them back into a number. But analogue computers work by ta…
There are very good reasons for which we aren't typing these comments on analog computers, and we don't have analog computers in our pockets, and all the data we store, including everything that we experience as analog (music, images, video) are actually stored in digital format. And before that, the way we write language, numbers, and music is digital, not analog- despite the fact that we seem to think more in an an…
I haven't seen Arrival myself but I had a discussion with someone who did and, boy, did he was extremely on the linguistic determinism side! After some reminescence and analysis of the discussion I came to bold conclusion that defending strong Sapir-Worf hypothesis is very much akin to racism. Basically, you prohibit someone not fluent in the language of your choice the ability to see the world just like you do or ev…
Maybe I'm being too literal, but how can a grammar be Turing complete? The usual definition of Turing completeness is being able to simulate an arbitrary Turing machine. Typical human languages don't do beta reductions like Lambda Calculus, so I fail to see how a grammar (or the language produced by the grammar) can be said to compute anything.
Stack machines = context free languages = primitive recursive functions. (?)
Turingmachines = context sensitive languages = total recursive functions. (?)
Or something like that.