Planetary Museum

"You can imagine that every piece of software can actually be regarded as a whole paragraph of language. When all the sentences are finally translated into 01, they are actually a very long word to the computer."

Joey stretched his hands as hard as he could: "In linguistics, the basic components of language are not words. Words are the hardware foundation of language. The words in each language are actually set by users for convenience."

"English letters are actually simple convention symbols. Chinese characters first came from simulating a specific thing, based on pictograms. The basis of language is words—words represent an exact meaning."

"For example, spring in Chinese and spring in English - in terms of the concept of spring, they can be considered roughly equal, but the two cannot completely replace them. Because spring is just the linguistic intersection of the two, except for the intersection In addition to meaning, both words also have other meanings respectively.

"In English, spring also represents spring water and spring. These two concepts do not exist in Chinese. Similarly, spring in Chinese can also refer to a certain kind of good situation. Separately, someone's spring Here, there is a hint of sexual innuendo - but this usage does not exist in English either."

"This phenomenon that one word represents multiple meanings is called linguistic complexity here. There is no specific indicator, but a perceptual scale."

"Let's put it this way, it's still spring. In English, its complexity is slightly higher than in Chinese, but it's roughly the same."

"Both are commonly used words, and the complexity itself represents the deduction in the process of language use and the complexity of civilization itself-if we go back to the Stone Age, perhaps there may be words similar to spring in the ancient alphabet, maybe the word The symbols are completely different, but the meaning it expresses must be about the same as the Chinese spring and the English spring.”

"However, even if there is such a word, we can completely conclude that the complexity of this word will not be higher than the current spring and spring. Why, because the more meanings of the word are not given at the beginning of the language, but It has evolved by itself over a long period of use."

"A civilization that doesn't even have iron tools will certainly not have the concept of a spring - and naturally there is no need for a corresponding word. Similarly, in a society where sexual morality has not yet emerged, such advanced humor as sexual innuendo is also impossible There is a basis for existence."

This man named Joey speaks like he smokes, speaking in one breath, with almost no pauses in the middle.Although his Chinese is not authentic, and a few words will be included in the middle of the speech, but the general meaning is clear.It could be seen that he was a little excited - I don't know if it was the inertia after staying up all night, or the enthusiasm inspired by the topic itself.

This passage contains a lot of information, but it is actually not difficult for Chen She to accept.

Because the project began to pay attention to linguistics very early, and Chen She had already dabbled in some of these viewpoints when doing homework.Although I didn't do a special in-depth understanding, it is really not a big problem to understand these words.What Joey said is just a deeper foundation on the previous basis - it's not that their company has made any deeper academic achievements, it's just that they have used more professional linguistic knowledge in application.

"Language with a higher degree of complexity is often reflected in literature, to the extent that a writer's pioneering use of language itself is to give more meaning to the same word, or to generate more meaning between words. mapping, and even create brand-new vocabulary according to their own expressive needs.”

"For example, the English superman of Superman. This concept was first proposed by the philosopher Nietzsche. In German, it refers to a certain ideal type of outstanding person in the future. After being translated into English by Bernard Shaw, a new word superman was created. .”

"Superman is a simple word that can be used to refer to the complex description in Nietzsche's original works. This kind of creativity itself can be regarded as the refinement and processing of information. In Chinese, this phenomenon is more common. Idioms in Chinese can be said to be the most representative series of creative vocabulary. Simple four characters often represent a collection of very complex concepts.

"But machine language... no, I should put it another way, programming language. If I use this complexity criterion for languages ​​and apply it to most programming languages, then the scores of these programming languages ​​will be one A value infinitely close to 0."

"I have said before that the program is the most precise language - you can imagine one, a Tetris game language, the whole program is like a word, this word must be meaningful, if we combine Show the 01 of this program to the aliens, and show them the operating environment attached to the program, if the program can be run—then the aliens will definitely be able to see an exact meaning.”

"In this specific meaning, it is an intention of continually appearing and disappearing geometric figures of different shapes-but the individual program statements that compose this program are meaningless in themselves, because just like when we are talking about cutting a boat and seeking a sword, I will not discuss the speed of the ship, the weight of the sword, these factors are the same..."

To be honest, after hearing this, Chen She already had a little difficulty in understanding, and Joey also saw this. He slowed down his speech appropriately, but Chen She still seemed to have difficulty keeping up with his progress.

So Joey can only give a simple conclusion: "In the past, there was no complex language that met the definition of linguistics on the earth. But now... Although we don't know how it appeared, we think we have found it. ...do you know what that means?"

Chen She shook her head.

"It means that maybe on this planet, in the computer room of a large company, there are some civilization structures—I'm not talking about AI, but they must be some kind of program that masters the rules of language, or some kind of ……thing."

"Their language is so complicated... When I was learning Chinese, I knew that the most difficult thing to understand in Chinese is the four-character idioms. Each idiom can involve more than a dozen intentions with attached words."

"Such as carving a boat for a sword, boat, sword, people on board, this is basic, and then there are derived concepts, the sheltering properties of water, the density properties relative to swords, the dangerous properties relative to people... imagine an alien To understand the word Ke Zhou Qiu Jian, he needs to understand how many derivative concepts. Finally, after fully understanding these concepts, he may understand a certain intention that the idiom itself specifically refers to—it is used to satirize subjective will because of ignoring Stupid behavior caused by changes in objective conditions.

"In English, there are actually short sentences similar to idioms, so I won't go into details..."

"This machine language we just discovered, you know, in its language library, we find the most complex 'idioms', how many intentional references?"

Chen She looked at Joey, and he raised two fingers: "More than 2000... Strictly speaking, it can no longer be regarded as an idiom. You know, more than 2000 intentions, generally speaking, more than 2000 words .To express these words, taking into account the necessary smoothness of the sentence and the logic of the front and back, if it is roughly written in Chinese, with just this one word, you can start to write a novel with tens of thousands of words.”

"In fact, idioms can be regarded as highly compressed novel stories-but in machine language, the complexity of the story is higher. Imagine such a scene, an alien chatting with you on the computer. He said words, which contain two such keywords-these words are all represented by 01, which is just one or two rows. But when translated, it can be tens of thousands of words long. You may need to read it carefully for 20 minutes , Think about it for another 20 minutes before you understand the meaning of these two words—then shout out, it’s so fucking amazing!"

"So, your task..." Chen She tried to guess: "Is it to translate this kind of text?"

"Translation?" Joey shook his head, "This statement is too arrogant."

"Arrogant?"

"The meaning of translation is to convert all the meanings of the other party's words into intentions that we can understand. But, as I said just now, the complexity of the two civilizations is not at the same level at all-a word of the other party can be understood. Let you think for an hour... This is still the easiest to understand. Can you imagine that if you go back to primitive society, what you say to primitive people may be accurately translated by them?"

When Joey said this, the cigarette in his hand was almost finished. He inhaled the last puff of smoke, then raised his head slightly, and exhaled the smoke towards the top of Chen She's head, forming a cloud above his head. A small cloud of mist.This action is not very polite, but it also seems a bit childish.Joey pointed to the fog and said to him: "Not to mention, in their language, the definition of time is stricter - the same word has different meanings in different contexts, you are Chinese, it is easy to understand. But, What if a word has a different meaning in each of the 24 hours of the day?"

"For example, there is a word corresponding to the sun in their language, and the meaning of each hour is different... Chaoyang, sunset, scorching sun, rising sun... There are many words about the sun in Chinese, but in this machine language In Chinese, the sun is just a simple and unchanging word, but its meaning is more than all the words with the sun in Chinese combined, can you imagine?"

"It's wishful thinking to talk about translation," Joy continued. "For us, we are just paying respects. It's like a primitive man learning Chinese and even three hundred Tang poems with a textbook with missing pages. ...Of course, the specific language rules are the responsibility of those linguistic experts. This part we do is to roughly determine the individual words in this digital language, and the simple data matching work... The least important thing in the whole project Technical content. It looks the busiest, but in fact..."

Joey shook his head: "This feeling... Hey, in fact, programmers rarely have this kind of frustration, because in most projects, we are responsible for advancing the work..."

Chen She nodded: "I understand, this feels uncomfortable."

Joey threw away the cigarette: "Then, let's talk about your company... Is your company still recruiting people? By the way, can you handle the work visa for China?"

Chen She was surprised: "This should only be a temporary project." If you want to keep all the people in a project, then Qinglan Consulting should be able to start Foxconn now.

"I know, although I know there is no hope, but I still have to ask this question," Joey said, "I am looking forward to your company's future projects... For us, we may never come across a project like this once in our lifetime. , you know, many people in our project team even think that your government has discovered aliens and is now letting us communicate with them.”

Joey didn't know that his inference was quite close to the truth.

"All information will be kept confidential..." Chen She reminded tactfully.

"I know that, you don't even let us use your mobile phone here..." Joey shrugged, "I checked your company's information on the Internet, and it has only been established for less than a year... If your company recruits people in the future, Email me... Qinglan Consulting is much cooler than Google."