From: Spike Jones (spike66@attglobal.net)
Date: Mon May 28 2001 - 11:25:17 MDT
> Lee Corbin wrote: Aliens land eventually, and in a
> certain ruined city they come across an immense scale
> model of the Mississippi river valley....He finds that for each
> tributary depicted on the map, there is an actual tributary
> of a large river system ...any
> other piece of intelligent apparatus in the universe will
> make the same discovery (or it's not very intelligent)...Lee Corbin
The question of how to define intelligence is central to the
discussion of the Singularity. Pondering the question in
light of my ongoing prime number research is what has
me thinking of the Singularity again.
Suppose instead of aliens landing on a ruined earth, we
send the map to them. This map is of a structure that any
apparatus we would call intellingent would recognize. The
simplest one I know of that fits this description is Sagan's
list of primes as described in Contact.
Now suppose one wishes to beam some kind of message
analogous to a list of primes, except we want to demonstrate
that the sender is *really* intelligent, not just a simple list of
primes. What do we send? spike
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