I wrote a reply to a separate comment you made in this thread here, but it’s relevant for this comment too. The idea that the data looks like “a 2-d grid” is an assumption true only for uncompressed bitmaps, but not for JPGs, PNGs, RAW, or any video codec. The statement that the limiting factor is “extreme patience” hints that this is really a question asking “what is the computational complexity[1] of an algorithm that can supposedly decode arbitrary data”?
I don’t think this algorithm could decode arbitrary data in a reasonable amount of time. I think it could decode some particularly structured types of data, and I think “fairly unprocessed sensor data from a very large number of nearly identical sensors” is one of those types of data.
I actually don’t know if my proposed method would work with jpgs—the whole discrete cosine transform thing destroys data in a way that might not leave you with enough information to make much progress. In general if there’s lossy compression I expect that to make things much harder, and lossless compression I’d expect either makes it impossible (if you don’t figure out the encoding) or not meaningfully different than uncompressed (if you do).
RAW I’d expect is better than a bitmap, assuming no encryption step, on the hypothesis that more data is better.
Also I kind of doubt that the situation where some AI with no priors encounters a single frame of video but somehow has access to 1000 GPU years to analyze that frame would come up IRL. The point as I see it is more about whether it’s possible with a halfway reasonable amount of compute or whether That Alien Message was completely off-base.
I wrote a reply to a separate comment you made in this thread here, but it’s relevant for this comment too. The idea that the data looks like “a 2-d grid” is an assumption true only for uncompressed bitmaps, but not for JPGs, PNGs, RAW, or any video codec. The statement that the limiting factor is “extreme patience” hints that this is really a question asking “what is the computational complexity[1] of an algorithm that can supposedly decode arbitrary data”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity
I don’t think this algorithm could decode arbitrary data in a reasonable amount of time. I think it could decode some particularly structured types of data, and I think “fairly unprocessed sensor data from a very large number of nearly identical sensors” is one of those types of data.
I actually don’t know if my proposed method would work with jpgs—the whole discrete cosine transform thing destroys data in a way that might not leave you with enough information to make much progress. In general if there’s lossy compression I expect that to make things much harder, and lossless compression I’d expect either makes it impossible (if you don’t figure out the encoding) or not meaningfully different than uncompressed (if you do).
RAW I’d expect is better than a bitmap, assuming no encryption step, on the hypothesis that more data is better.
Also I kind of doubt that the situation where some AI with no priors encounters a single frame of video but somehow has access to 1000 GPU years to analyze that frame would come up IRL. The point as I see it is more about whether it’s possible with a halfway reasonable amount of compute or whether That Alien Message was completely off-base.