- [Interviewer] I apologize for
the absurd philosophical question,
but if an alien species
were to visit earth,
do you think we would be able
to find a common language,
or protocol of communication with them?
- [Noam] There are arguments
to the effect that we could,
in fact, one of them was Marv Minsky's.
Back about 20 or 30 years ago,
he performed a sort of brief experiment
with a student of his, Dan Barlborough.
They essentially ran the simplest
possible Turing machines,
just free, to see what would happen.
And most of them crashed.
Either got into an infinite loop,
or were flossed out.
The few that persisted,
essentially gave
something like arithmetic,
and his conclusion from that was that
if some alien species developed
a higher intelligence,
they would at least have arithmetic,
they would at least have
what the simplest computer would do.
And in fact, he didn't
know that at the time,
but the core principals
of natural language
are based on operations which yield
something like arithmetic,
in the limiting case,
and the minimal case.
So it's conceivable
that a mode of communication
could be established
based on the core properties
of human language,
and the core properties of arithmetic,
which maybe are universally shared.
So it's conceivable.
