From: Yvan Dutil (Yvan.Dutil@sympatico.ca)
Date: Thu Jan 24 2002 - 18:24:29 PST
Richard Burke-Ward a écrit :
> > That's what tripped me up, John! I tried to factor the bit stream as the
> > product of two prime numbers (so as to set up a matrix), and failed
> > dismally. Then I figured it must be a 3-dimensional image, and tried for a
> > product of 3 primes, without success. It never occured to me that there
> > were simulated message dropouts. So, I guess I'm not as clever as we're
> > expecting ETI to be.
>
> Folks, human vision is a better patter-detector than mathematics! Why not
> just try varying the page-width of the digit stream until a pattern emerges?
> Takes about 3 minutes!
Yes, the human brain is EXTREMELY poweerful at picking up patern. We
we will have to keep this in mind in our program.
> You'll find there are missing / extra digits in the stream - and also a very
> obvious explanation (well, obvious after the event!) for why overall number
> of digits is no help... I don't want to give too much away - play with it
> yourselves - but that margin-setting tip should get you started in almost no
> time.
Yo know that the "primes factor product" formating has been prove to be
wortheless
by Carl Sagan in sometime around 1961! (cf Shklovskii & Sagan). Anyway, I
am very glad to see that at least part of my error correcting scheme worked
well.
Yvan Dutil
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