That situation is not dynamically stable. They would pull on each other and eventually collide or gravitationally scatter until they weren't in the same orbit as each other.

You could do that with a Jupiter-sized planet and an Earth-sized planet, though, perhaps (there is a minimum mass ratio). What would we call that Earth, then? A trojan companion of the Jupiter. Perhaps we'd invent the term 'companion planet', which is lower in status, like 'dwarf planet', than a regular planet.

There is at least one exception, though. If those two ``planets'' are located at the opposite side of sun (they are collinear, and sun is in the middle ), have identical masses, and the shared orbit is a perfect circle.

IMHO, the ``dwarf'' implies small in size.  Otherwise when we meet Umgah, they will probably say, ``You call that big thing dwarf  planet? Good joke, better than the Maus tank!''

Guys, think about this:

If we do find 2 or more jupiter-sized heaven bodies sharing the same orbit (failed to clear paths of each other), will we call them dwarf planets?

Some strings are harder than others. Your example is indeterminate. Obviously, if you are attempting to give a primer to an alien species, you will attempt to make your string relatively easy. And it is this which makes the problem completely different from the solving of ancient languages. You have a lot of common context with the aliens, and both of you are trying to make it easy on the other. This is itself a very important clue as to the meaning.

In your example, you need to define what is the simple message and the simple meassage representation. Do you have that in mind?

Ok, alien has sent a message to you. Your computer has already store them in binary bits form. What's your algorithm to solve/decipher it?

Chinese doesn't have tensed verbs that change their form based on time. It does, however, have many ways to tell us the time frame a sentence takes place in.  The Orz language as we have it presented to us contains no such indications; either their time-indicators are impossible for the translating computer to figure out, or the Orz don't use them.

Well, I will clarify something first.
1. In terms of Chinese, the characters doesn't change to reflect the tenses, but you can add certain terms to express the tenses. (I'm a native speaker, are you?)

2. The reason I mention Chinese here is that some of the guys weight the tenses too much. I would like to introduce the "tenseless" view.   As I said before, we don't care the tenses most of the time unless we really need them.

And the Orz aren't learning English -- they aren't even speaking in English in the first place, they're being translated by a computer. There are two possibilities that I see: the Precursor computer is able to magically translate the Orz's language as they speak, but the weirdness of the Orz's thought processes makes the translation inaccurate, or the Precursor computer can translate Orzese because Orzese is based on a different language, and the weirdness of Orzese is *introduced* into that language by the Orz's mindset. The argument that Orzese is just a language that randomly happened to evolve with a certain structure that made it seem weird to us is least compelling to me, since the language thing is clearly meant to be part of an overall presentation of the Orz as more alien than all the other (very non-human) aliens we've met.

Like you said, it is just a game, so for players' convenience, the precursor translating unit is able to get the main idea, but lacks the knowledge. But for me, orzese is not that hard to understand. As long as you don't limit yourself in *tense*. You can understand them better.

The way they talk strangely might point to the fact that they have neighbors in the sense you mean, or that they don't deal with their neighbors in the way that we're used to. There is hard and fast evidence that the Orz are a single entity with many projections that can exist on a higher dimensional level than human beings -- this is both the obvious reading of many, many of their lines and also something that has been commented on and confirmed by the creators outside the game, so no matter what they will not -- *cannot* -- think of their sentient neighbors the way we do, any more than we could understand what it was like to be an ant, or a desktop PC.

In simple words, the creater might said that Orz is a single entity, but he didn't said that Orz doen't have sentient neighbors. And I quite doubt they will said so. For following versions may have the story about the Orz's neighbors.

Sure, but they don't reply to it so dismissively, either.

Orz is not very hostile to human, but that's exactly what they answer, isn't it?

So yes, the translator is screwy, but it's not randomly screwy -- as the translator tells you, it's trying to give English words that carry some set of connotations that roughly match what the Orz is saying ("best-fits").

Well, currently, this kind of problems is identified as "Word sense disambiguation (WSD)". You can search the citeseer or google for literatures.

That said, point 3, also, is disputable; we don't know much about the Orz's thought processes at all, obviously, but most of the time they really seem to be going along their merry way without much concern for understanding you, your motivations or your needs. If we take the "hello" exchange as meaning to give us real information rather than just saying "Orz don't understand the Earth custom of greeting", then it's an example; the Orz don't actually ever ask you why you say hello or what greetings are (they don't ever actually ask you *anything*), but they tell you hello because it makes you happy, and say it multiple times so that you will be happier.

Learning doen't not necessery contains asking. For example, Supox learns from copy. And a human infant is too young to have language to ask.

Reloading might be cheating, but we all probably do it from time to time.

Well, I love the "rewind" key of Znes. :-D
==================================
You don't even need to remember to save. :-P

Well, not just being tenseless but lacking any context with which to judge time. Chinese by nature doesn't contain any way to inflect a verb to give it a place in past, present or future but to infer anything from this about a Chinese attitude toward time is premature.
In ordinary conversation Chinese speakers use plenty of cues to locate a particular action in time when it's important to the conversation -- time-words form an integral part of the sentence, and take the place of Indo-European tensed verbs. Sure, in Chinese you *can* leave out time when it's clearly implied or you want to be purposely ambiguous or general. But the Orz seem to make all sorts of statements in the present tense (or what the struggling translator translates as the present tense to us) with zero clarification or indication of time.

Actually Chinese does have tenses, but using present tense is still Ok. By the way, if you consider that orz is learning English, and you are his teacher, how do you correct his grammar?

Yes and no. In real life you can only tell so much from how "strange" a language sounds, but the clear impression that the makers of the game wanted to make by having so much of the basic word base of the language translated and yet having the langauge still sound so stilted and weird was to make us feel that the cultural assumptions of the Orz were very different from our own.

Yep, but do you agree that some people talking strangely means that they have no neighbors? I don't think so. I use that as example to object Matticus's points.

The Orz have a generalized word that the translator interprets as *other*, and are convinced that *other* -- not just you, but the general concept of "other" -- is *strange*, by definition, and *Orz* can never be strange, by definition.

We, and other life forms in this sector are unfamiliar to Orz. But apparently they are familiar to themselves. If we define that "unfamiliar" as strange, then the life forms in this area, including you, are strange. Orz is familiar to him/herself, of course they are not strange.

We can not expect every alien replies the "You're strange" comment positively.

An apt analogy, but a flawed one, since human beings are all "photocopies" of each other anyway; our actual body mass is just made out of all the random food we eat and air we breathe. A human being born from a mother's womb is just a bunch of random organic crap the mother ate rearranged according to the data in a few strands of DNA. An Androsynth is just the same way, even if the DNA was poked around in a petri dish rather than being made by the random shaking and mixing of sex.

You totally miss my point.
If Orz identifies a life form by DNA or genes only, it can immediately recognize you and do the same thing to you.
But it didn't do that to you, because it notices something different. DNA is not the major feature for Orz to classify the life forms.

For example, scientist used to apply some perfume on worker ants, and those ants were attack by others when they returned their nest. Does perfume change their DNA? No.
Why were they attacked? They smelled different.

See... this little passage is disturbing because it actually goes against the evidence that the Orz are just like us and the translator's just screwy. At least we see that the idea of greeting or hailing a stranger whom one has met -- something that all other SC2 races we meet do, and something that the Orz seem to confirm is common among normal races, with their use of the general *campers* rather than "you" -- is utterly alien to the Orz, and they only do it because they think it makes us happy. To them it has no function -- they're not used to having to be alerted or have their attention drawn to others' presence, interestingly, and they don't go through social rituals to initiate contact with others.

They *still* don't understand the concept of greeting to establish friendly intent as a social ritual -- they think greeting-words like "Hello" are magic words, that they can use to automatically alter humans' mood, like pressing a button. They don't understand how we think, nor do they seem to really care to; they figure out what makes us happy -- what keeps us from making trouble -- and they just do it because it suits them, and they expect it to work on us mechanically rather than thinking about our point of view as thinking beings.

1. Translator is screwy doen't means it will make mistake all the time.
2. IMHO, if translator is not screwy, it should translate "no function" to "useless".
3. What I am trying to claim is:
  a. Orz doesn't not much about human.
  b. Orz tries to understand human.
4. Orz might not consider that "hello" is the magic word as you described. You said "Hello", a few minutes later you have a peaceful ending. They might conclude that "hello" is a positive word which is good to say.

A mathematician-historian attempted to use Bayesian methods to decipher a long text of an ancient language much older than Etruscan. Given only about 100 pages of text, she managed to very strongly constrain the meanings. She provided a best-guess meaning, but that was attacked as being too unfounded. However, she was quite willing to admit that it was simply the least-unlikely meaning guess based on the mathematical model, and other guesses of varying similarity also ranked highly. I cannot remember her name, the language, etc. This is frustrating, I will look around.

Thirdly, Etruscan is not a great example. How much Etruscan text do we have? The Bayesian methods one might use would require large sample sizes. I doubt that we have  more than 10 megabytes of Unicode-format Etruscan text, total. If we were to dredge up, say, a few gigabytes of data with context supplied, we would run an excellent chance of translating the language from scratch

I would like to read the algorithms you describe and test them with Chinese documents. Since we definitely have millions of Chinese documents. We have enough training set and test set.

. Sure, that's a heck of a lot of text for people writing with chisels. But the question at hand is not deciphering ancient Etruscan, it's futuristic first contacts.

If it can properly solves ancient Etruscan without prior Etruscan knowledge, the same technique can be used to first contacts.

But in order to develope the mircle technique, we should solve following problem first:

Given a long binary bit string as training instance, and a shorter binary bit string as test instance, explain what does the test instance mean.

If the problem solved, there will be no problems in the fields of deciphering text, OCR, WSD and translation. :-)

In terms of WSD, would you mind to tell me what does the 'right' mean in following text.

Testee: "Turn left?"
Examiner: "Right"

How can you guys forget mighty(or poor) Dnyarri?

Your job is done, Captain! You have saved me! You can now safely remove your psychic protection device, and leave.
THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THAN
Why are you looking at me like that, Captain?
Don't you believe me? You question my word?
Okay, okay... so I was lying.
Big deal! So what.
Boy, you are A PAIN. Do you know that?
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME, MY LIFE!?
You do? Oh.

And

Are you lonely, Captain?
Are you misunderstood by everyone else on the ship?
Is that why you KEEP CALLING ME WHEN I AM RESTING!?

And the contract to the God from the Druuge.

[or]

This would also explain why all of the verbs in Orz communications are in the present tense. It is shown that the Orz have a concept of time. They say things like "Six or nine *pieces* ago..." and such. And yet all of the verbs are in the present tense. Why? Although the Orz can obviously remember and think about things that have happened in the past, it does this thinking and remembering in the present so that's how it is communicated. It's as though the Orz is replaying the memories in its mind and so communicating as though these things are happening in the present.

My explaination is simpler, they just do not have the other tense. Ask your Chinese friends about what they think about English tense. http://uqm.stack.nl/yabb/images/wink.gif

Well this would naturally bring about questions relating to how the Orz communicate with beings in its native dimension. My answer to such questions is that either those other beings share similar knowledge and assumptions and can just intuitively pick up the contexts of the information communicated or that there simply are no other beings in the Orz's native dimension it can communicate with. Either such beings do not have the capacity to communicate with the Orz or simply do not exist.

China has neighbors such as Japan and Korea which has much more complex tenses and completely different syntaxs, but it doesn't affect the way that Chinese speaking. :-)

I have a tendency to lean more towards the latter. I believe the Orz is the only being to exist in its dimension. I believe this because the Orz doesn't seem to pick up on the concept that other beings may have different views and opinions of things than it does. It assumes that you will want a *party* and that you want to be *connected* in order for them to share other *levels* with you because that's how it views things. Such a being my have some trouble picking up on the nuance that there are other ways of thinking, which may be why the Orz react with such violent frustration whenever something happens contrary to what they think should happen. After all, what other point of view is there?

There is also a statement that would tend to support that the Orz are used to existing alone:

Orz cannot be strange. Orz is Orz. Strange is other thing.

This shows a tendency to view reality as being only one of two things: Orz and everything else. And as everything else, by definition, isn't Orz, everything else is strange.

I prefer the view:"Everything uncommon is strange."
If you have never heard of marsupials, when you see one, of course you will think that it is strange.

Suppose Orz said:" You are so strange."

What do you have in mind? Of course you will think: "You are strange, not me."

It doesn't support that Orz is the only sentience being in their home dimension.

This is further supported by the fact that the Orz doesn't seem to differentiate between other beings beyond its ability to tell individuals or certain groups from one another. For example, consider the Orz's take on the Androsynth and humans from one of my previous quotes:


You are not the same too much like Androsynth. You are *happy campers*.

Uh... humans aren't very similar to the Androsynth? Genetically, they are nigh identical but the Orz either doesn't recognize that or doesn't view it as being important. The Orz does differentiate between humans and Androsynth, but this differentiation is based on the attitude of the Captain towards the Orz as compared to the attitude of the Androsynth in general towards it. It seems to ignore or to be unaware of the physical similarities between Androsynth and humans.

Thanks, Arilou! :-)
In our senses, we recognize that human and Androsynth are similar in the level of genes. But beyond that we can not recognize what's difference. Orz however, recognize objects in difference aspects. They *smell* objects. If what Arilou said is true, then Orz will not realize the similarity between human and Androsynth because they have different *smell*.

Human make (what the damn tense I should use?) perfect copies of themselves  to make Androsynth in genic level, but probably nothing else. Consider a photocopier, it can perfectly copy the image and text, but it can not copy the smell (literally) of original document.

Alright, to sum up: the Orz language causes so many problems because it is not a "language" so much as the direct inner ramblings of the Orz entity. This method of communication is the result of the Orz being the only entity able to communicate in its native dimension, or perhaps of the Orz being the only being in its native dimension. The latter would tend to be supported by the Orz's inability to understand why other things have a different point of view, and also its tendency to view all things in existence as ultimately being either Orz or not Orz. An example of the Orz's inexperience in classification is demonstrated by the Androsynth/human example.

Apperently Orz have its own language. And it is trying to learn. Because:


*Campers* like to say `hello' when they *smell* the Orz.
We have learned this. It is *no function* but Orz want to make *campers* happy everyday.
Okay... Hello!! Now you are happy I am sure.


All the misunderstanding is because we (and they) do not have time to get enough training set to build a desirable translator.

If your book is big enough, you can get a long way. Certain concepts will be used alongside eachother a lot, and if you know one, you'll have only limited choice for the other. Once you know the word for "eat", you'll know a lot about the nouns that accompany it. Initially, it's just a matter of trying things, and trying something else if that doesn't lead to a consistent whole.
But a human language is a lot easier than an alien language, as for humans you know you have a lot more common reference points.

Even if the book is large enough, it is still very hard to translate without dictionaries. Yeah, if you can identified the words. But how can you identified the words in the first place?

A human language is a lot easier that an alien language. Therefore, I quite doubt the effectiveness of SETI project unless it has sucessfully translated the ohter human languages  in to english without help of the dictionaries.