Vol 4 Chapter 741: Characters of text

Language is not so mysterious, but is actually the way that intelligent life communicates.
Any communication method requires a medium.
The medium through which humans communicate by sound is air.
Therefore, under normal circumstances, if life is born on planets with atmosphere, then these life will gradually evolve the ability to communicate with voice.
Every way of communication is related to the biological sense organs.
In addition to voice communication, humans can also use body language. The sensory organs used by body language are eyes, which transmit information through vision.
If a creature has evolved an organ that emits electromagnetic waves, then there will also be a faster way of communication.
No matter what method is used for communication, as long as you want to record the information, words will inevitably be produced.
The electronic information department of the Academy of Military Sciences took three days to find out all the information recorded in the meteorite microbe genes and gave a more detailed report.
"From the analysis of base coding, the message left by the meteorite civilization should be based on words..."
While watching the analysis report, Lu Xiuwen explained to the students in the military scientific research class: "The characters left by the meteorite civilization in the microbial genetic code are about 20,000 characters or words.
"There are more than 2,000 independent words or words that are not repeated. From this characteristic, the repetition rate of the characters of the meteorite civilization is not high, and they are not English alphabetical characters."
"How can you tell that it is not alphabetic?" Niu Dazhi asked curiously.
"Isn't it simple? If it is a letter, there are only 26, how can there be 2,000 unique words? Even if there are a lot of letters in the meteorite civilization, there are 100 letters, that is, 100 independent and unique letters, no It will be 2,000. Unless this civilization has a pit in its brain, get 2,000 letters out." Eve explained.
"Okay, no English is great." Niu Dazhi immediately applauded.
Eve covered his forehead, showing an expression that he could not save.
"If it is 2000 letters, with such a huge alphabet library, a single letter should have a separate meaning, which is actually no different from a single word. The reason why a single letter in English does not have a meaning is because the alphabet library is too small and requires more Only a letter can express meaning." Lu Xiuwen added.
In addition to professors from the Institute of Biology, several professors of cosmological sociology were present.
Lang Tongguang is more professional in the study of alien civilization.
He took out a document, sent it to the people in front of him, and explained: "In fact, after receiving the analysis report of the information left by the Academy of Military Sciences on the meteorite civilization, several colleagues and I immediately made a text comparison.
"This is our single-character statistics using several Chinese character papers. As the meteorite civilization information analysis shows, there are a total of 20,000 characters.
"So, we selected a few papers of about 20,000 words for statistics, and the result is that the number of independent and non-repetitive words in the paper is between 1,000 and 1,400.
"The English paper will not be considered for the time being. There are only 26 independent letters that are not repeated, plus the number of Arabic numerals to 36, which is of no reference value.
"We have done more than one hundred copies of the single-character statistics of the Chinese character literature, and the results are all between 1,000 and 1,400, with an average of 1,200 words.
"The sample is sufficient, so it is basically certain that the document written in Chinese characters has an average of 1,200 independent words without repetition under the length of 20,000 characters.
"There is some gap between this and the 2000 non-repetitive independent words of the meteorite civilization. However, the gap is less than twice. This gap is not that big in the study of alien characters.
"Therefore, judging from the number of independent words that have appeared, the characters used in the meteorite civilization have similar characteristics to Chinese characters.
"It can be preliminarily determined that the font library of meteorite civilization should be larger than Chinese characters, and the number of commonly used characters is also more than that of Chinese characters.
"According to these characters, deciphering will be much easier."
Fang Yuan pondered for a moment and asked: "How long will it take to decipher the meaning of this information?"
"This is still unclear. Because there is no basic point, it is very difficult to decipher using the exhaustive method. What is more difficult is that even with the exhaustive method, there is no standard answer. Even if the result is deciphered, It is impossible to determine whether the result of the deciphering is correct, this is the most difficult place." Lang Tongguang explained.
"Is there no better way?" Fang Yuan felt that the technical means of the Academy of Military Sciences should not be so.
"Of course there is a way. You can first determine part of the text by guessing..."
Lang Tongguang went on to explain: "For example, through analysis, we have basically determined that the meteorite civilization is all characters, and has many characteristics similar to Chinese characters.
"Then, we can guess further. In the documents left by the meteorite civilization, what is the meaning of the most repeated words?
"For example, in the Chinese character literature, the most repeated character is generally the character'的', and the second character is the character'Yes'.
"Then, we can continue to guess whether there is also the word'of' in the text of the meteorite civilization.
"If so, is the word that is repeated the most, "of" or a word with similar meaning.
"Of course this is just a guess, because the Chinese word'的' is an auxiliary word and has no meaning in itself.
"We are still not sure that there are such meaningless particles in the language of the meteorite civilization.
"So, this guessing process needs to be verified to determine whether it is correct."
Lu Xiuwen took over and said, "Indeed, the study of alien characters is really difficult. It is not like Oracle, which can guess its meaning through the shape of the text.
"What we have before us is a string of meaningless codes. It is really difficult to guess the meaning of the text based on the characteristics of the code."
Fang Yuan nodded while thinking: "It's true, but you can also guess what information may be left by the meteorite civilization, and then code and decipher it.
"For example, when the meteorite civilization is destroyed, the most desired message should be introduced at the beginning of their civilization. Then it should also talk about the reason for the destruction of civilization. Was it destroyed by higher civilizations? Or was it destroyed by natural disasters in the universe.
"It should be easier to speculate on the content of the information before deciphering the text?"
Lang Tongguang nodded in agreement: "This idea is correct, but supercomputers are still needed to decipher. The human brain has the advantage of imagination, but in terms of computing power, computers have more advantages."
"It shouldn't take too long, one or two weeks, you should be able to get results." Lu Xiuwen said.