Re: OT - Enough to Gag a Maggot

[Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@xxxxxxx>]

Bruce Grant wrote:

> If we could arrange to have the VMS transmitted convincingly from space,
> we could enlist the help of a whole new set of players, the SETI
> community! Anybody got any pals at NASA?
> 
> Bruce

An odd thgought that springs from this that may actually be of
real use for the VMS.  Those SETI guys crunch an awful lot of
data.  I know it's of a very different nature, but I wonder if
their methods have any application?  They basically are looking
for set patterns not caused by natural phenomena in a sea of
noise with little preset notions as to what they are looking
for.  Perhaps it might lend itself to picking out oddities and
identifying patterns...Anyone know more about the subject?  If
those methods are of any use, we could synthesize the text into
a sound file and feed it through the programs they already
have.  Since it would be an intelligent signal, you would have
to somehow change the tolerances on what the program wants to
call intelligent, but I assume with that much data to work on,
their software already does this in a multiple tiered 'weeding
out' process.  They might even have software built up in reserve
for 'the big day'.  It's a longshot, but who knows, they might
be able with a few keystrokes to produce a hundred variants on
every type of analyses done so far as well as quite a few not
thought of yet.  Anyone know anybody in SETI?  On a similar
note, what other existing forms of sophisticated data analyses
are out there?  Maybe instead of modifying existing techniques
we could just translate the text into different forms?  I
believe some work has been done in computer analyses of the
musical styles of various composers, for one example.  Sounds
crazy, but at least it's a different approach.
Regards,
Brian