CosmicOS - Paul Fitzpatrick

outline
goals
status
downloads
references

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Development has moved to cosmicos.sourceforge.net.

Outline of CosmicOS

It's a familiar problem. You've finally managed to contact that alien civilization. Things are going great. You feel like your world will never be the same, that whole new realms of possibilities are opening up before your eyes. Then, inevitably, a hint of strain starts to creep into your relationship. You find that you don't really have all that much in common. Heck, sometimes it feels like you're not even in the same galaxy. It's as if there is this vast gulf between you, making communication almost impossible. You're not even sure you'd understand each other no matter how physically close you become. What do you do?

You design a language for cosmic intercourse. Hans Freudenthal made a start at one in his book, Lincos, published in 1960. I think it's time for version II, the all-new action-packed sequel guaranteed to have you on the edge of your seat, which is a specific structure with a flat surface perpendicular to the pull of gravity, which is a thing that, oh never mind.

more...

Goals of CosmicOS

To create a complete message which, if noticed by a non-human intelligence, stands some chance of being understood. The message should introduce the intelligence to a significant portion of the human world view.

To develop this message in a form that is easy to edit and extend, so that anyone interested can simply take it and make it better without having to track down out-of-print books.

To avoid making too many assumptions about the perceptual abilities of the non-human intelligence; for example that they make sense of 2D images in the same way we do. While some arguments can be made for this, as a machine vision researcher I am very skeptical that we really understand the variability possible here.

To send Scheme into deep space.
To send the GPL into deep space.

The "intelligence" reading the message could be extra-terrestrial, or artificial. It is this second possibility that motivates me -- I want this message as a challenge for AI -- but the ET possibility is also fun.

Current status

The current goal of development work on CosmicOS is to communicate enough structure to simulate a simple MUD (multi-user dungeon) and to use the interactions between locations, objects, and characters as an alternative to the clever "morality plays" in Lincos.

The message has a strong backbone of actual executable code. The results of executing code is fundamentally what gets talked about in most of the message so far. This has the advantage that it can be understood on two levels: working out what the code does by looking at its details, or just treating it as a black box and learning from examples what it does. It also gives the listener the ability to do experiments using the code that are not talked about in the message. At the level of the MUD, this means the listener is free to play around with the simulated world and understand its logic through experimentation.

A difficulty with using code is that it assumes the listener has a computer to run the code on, or is computer-like enough themselves to work through the code with excruciating patience. I'm okay with this assumption for now, since it is hard to imagine the message being detected in the first place without some good hardware.

Source code

References

          AUTHOR : Freudenthal, Hans
           TITLE : Lincos; design of a language for cosmic intercourse.
        LANGUAGE : ENGLISH
       PUBLISHED : Amsterdam, North-Holland Pub. Co., 1960-
   PHYSICAL DESC : v. 23 cm.
          SERIES : Studies in logic and the foundations of mathematics; 
         SUBJECT : Lincos (Artificial language)