I don’t know whether or not we could use an LLM this way, and I think in this particular framing of the question we couldn’t even be certain that the Alienese corpus didn’t contain any transliterated English (after all, if signals can get from their planet to our planet, can we really be sure no signals have gone from our planet to theirs? Especially if they’re only a few light-years away..) - but I do think that we could have a fair crack at deciphering their language without the use of an LLM if we had to, and it’d look a bit like codebreaking.
Maybe we’d start by looking for numbers: for the statistical relationships between different symbols that would indicate different base counting systems. For example, if in many parts of the data we see the same ten symbols used over and over with nothing in between it would be pretty easy to distinguish a base-ten counting system even if the ten symbols were “∆¥π®✓=§*£@” instead of “0123456789″)
Once we’d found the numbers, we could probably find mathematical equations that we also knew, and deduce operands like “+”, “-”, “*”, etc. Then if we find equations that describe physical things that are the same on Earth we could probably deduce the words for those physical things For example, in E=mc² we could have deduced the “squared” operand in the previous step, and “c” would have the same value on Earth, so we could deduce the words* for “energy” and “mass”. We could then use our knowledge of “energy”, Planck’s constant (h) being the same on Earth, and E = hv, to work out their word for v (frequency), and so on and so on.
(*Or rather, the symbols, or multidimensional arrangements of symbols, representing these things: they probably wouldn’t have words. I happen to imagine them as looking more like weights vectors..)
Meanwhile, once we had numbers, we could look for things like timestamps, and conduct periodicity analysis. If something happened at roughly the same time every day, but drifted slightly earlier and slightly later on a yearly cycle, we might be looking at sunrise, or sunset, or solar noon. (Naturally we wouldn’t need the lengths of the “day” or “year” to match up to our days or years, it’d be the pattern we were looking for, not the specific values). If the aliens were observing cosmological phenomena associated with specific values that we could also see from Earth (eg. pulsars, the cosmic microwave background) we might be able to identify their words for these things* from the aliens’ observations of them.
Once we had worked-out some of their cosmography (say, the time it takes their planet to orbit their star, or the distance from their star to certain heavenly bodies we can also observe from Earth (Sagittarius A* for example)) we might be able to narrow-down exactly where their star is, observe it directly from Earth, and obtain data that we could match-up to numbers in the dataset. We could then use the position and velocity of their star to work out when they would have observed phenomena that we also observed (such as supernovae) compare this to when we observed the same phenomenon, and learn to convert fully between their dates and ours. We might even be able to work-out some of their colourspace (if they have one! I can’t help but imagine the aliens as one big machine intelligence, not a large number of individual biological organisms..) by associating our observed wavelength of the light from their sun (corrected for any redshift from our position) with the same values in their number system, to get the way they map colours, and then look for this structure elsewhere in the dataset.
I don’t know whether we could ever bootstrap from shared physical/astronomical observations and universally-true mathematics to a full understanding of the language—but my goodness, it’d be so interesting to try!
I don’t know whether or not we could use an LLM this way, and I think in this particular framing of the question we couldn’t even be certain that the Alienese corpus didn’t contain any transliterated English (after all, if signals can get from their planet to our planet, can we really be sure no signals have gone from our planet to theirs? Especially if they’re only a few light-years away..) - but I do think that we could have a fair crack at deciphering their language without the use of an LLM if we had to, and it’d look a bit like codebreaking.
Maybe we’d start by looking for numbers: for the statistical relationships between different symbols that would indicate different base counting systems. For example, if in many parts of the data we see the same ten symbols used over and over with nothing in between it would be pretty easy to distinguish a base-ten counting system even if the ten symbols were “∆¥π®✓=§*£@” instead of “0123456789″)
Once we’d found the numbers, we could probably find mathematical equations that we also knew, and deduce operands like “+”, “-”, “*”, etc. Then if we find equations that describe physical things that are the same on Earth we could probably deduce the words for those physical things For example, in E=mc² we could have deduced the “squared” operand in the previous step, and “c” would have the same value on Earth, so we could deduce the words* for “energy” and “mass”. We could then use our knowledge of “energy”, Planck’s constant (h) being the same on Earth, and E = hv, to work out their word for v (frequency), and so on and so on.
(*Or rather, the symbols, or multidimensional arrangements of symbols, representing these things: they probably wouldn’t have words. I happen to imagine them as looking more like weights vectors..)
Meanwhile, once we had numbers, we could look for things like timestamps, and conduct periodicity analysis. If something happened at roughly the same time every day, but drifted slightly earlier and slightly later on a yearly cycle, we might be looking at sunrise, or sunset, or solar noon. (Naturally we wouldn’t need the lengths of the “day” or “year” to match up to our days or years, it’d be the pattern we were looking for, not the specific values). If the aliens were observing cosmological phenomena associated with specific values that we could also see from Earth (eg. pulsars, the cosmic microwave background) we might be able to identify their words for these things* from the aliens’ observations of them.
Once we had worked-out some of their cosmography (say, the time it takes their planet to orbit their star, or the distance from their star to certain heavenly bodies we can also observe from Earth (Sagittarius A* for example)) we might be able to narrow-down exactly where their star is, observe it directly from Earth, and obtain data that we could match-up to numbers in the dataset. We could then use the position and velocity of their star to work out when they would have observed phenomena that we also observed (such as supernovae) compare this to when we observed the same phenomenon, and learn to convert fully between their dates and ours. We might even be able to work-out some of their colourspace (if they have one! I can’t help but imagine the aliens as one big machine intelligence, not a large number of individual biological organisms..) by associating our observed wavelength of the light from their sun (corrected for any redshift from our position) with the same values in their number system, to get the way they map colours, and then look for this structure elsewhere in the dataset.
I don’t know whether we could ever bootstrap from shared physical/astronomical observations and universally-true mathematics to a full understanding of the language—but my goodness, it’d be so interesting to try!