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Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by sdrinf on Monday July 20, 2015 @08:12AM (#9915442)
There are very few pieces of information really worthy of deliberate broadcasts across star-systems in the hopes of someone catching it. One of these few might be a full dump of neural vector-states (or functional equivalent thereof), at an appropriately low-level assembly, which when successfully executed, brings not a message, but the messenger itself.
Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by pavlov on Monday July 20, 2015 @09:03AM (#9915698)
In fact, any sufficiently advanced digital program can be a "messenger" rather than a "message". But how do we know what kind of execution environment is available at the destination?

Aliens probably use Brainfuck [1], so we need a substantial increase in Brainfuck AI research. Some modern-day Kennedy needs to step up to this challenge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative... by brianmcconnell on Monday July 20, 2015 @01:50PM (#9917744)
A fair amount of work has already been done with algorithmic communication systems, as its a small step from a mathematical language to a general purpose programming language. Paul Fitzpatrick, then with the MIT AI lab, developed the most complete framework around the idea, CosmicOS.