"You can imagine that every piece of software, in fact, can be seen as a whole paragraph of language, all the sentences, and when they are finally translated into 01, they are actually a very long word for the computer."

Joey's hands stretched as hard as he could: "In linguistics, the basic component of language is not words, words are the hardware foundation of language, and the words of each language are actually set by users for convenience. ”

"The English alphabet is actually a simple convention symbol, and Chinese characters were first derived from the simulation of a specific thing, based on pictograms. The basis of language is words – words that represent a definite meaning. ”

"For example, spring in Chinese and spring in English - in the concept of spring, they can be considered roughly equal, but the two cannot be completely replaced. Because spring is only a linguistic intersection of the two, in addition to the intersection meaning, the two words also have other meanings.

"In English, spring also means spring water, and spring, both of which are not found in Chinese. Similarly, spring in Chinese can also refer to a good situation, individually, someone's spring has arrived, and there is a taste of sexual innuendo - but this usage does not exist in English. ”

This phenomenon of multiple meanings of a single word is what we call linguistic complexity here. There is no specific indicator, it is a perceptual yardstick. ”

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

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

"But, even if such a word exists, we can be sure that the complexity of the word will not be higher than that of spring and spring now, why, because the more meaning of the word was not given at the beginning of the creation of language, but evolved itself in the long process of use."

"A civilization that doesn't even have iron tools would not have the concept of springs—and naturally there would be no need for corresponding words. In the same way, in a society where sexual morality has not yet emerged, there can be no basis for the existence of a high level of humor such as sexual innuendo. ”

The man named Joey spoke as if he were smoking, in one breath, with few pauses in between. Although his Chinese is not authentic, and a few words will be carried out in the middle, but the general meaning is clear. I could see that he was a little excited—I don't know if it was the inertia after staying up all night, or the enthusiasm aroused by the topic itself.

This passage is very informative, but it is actually not difficult for Chen She to accept.

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

"Language of higher complexity is often also embodied in literature, and to some extent, the pioneering use of language by writers is itself to give more meaning to the same word, or to produce more mappings between words, or even to create new words according to their own needs for expression."

For example, the concept of superman, which was first coined by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, refers to some kind of ideal and remarkable person in the future. After being translated into English by George Bernard Shaw, a new word superman was coined. ”

"Superman, a simple word, can be used to refer to the complex description, the creativity itself, in Nietzsche's original work, can be seen as the refinement and processing of information. In Chinese, such a phenomenon is more common, and idioms in Chinese can be said to be the most representative series of creative vocabulary, and the simple four words often represent a very complex collection of large concepts.

"But machine language ...... No, I should put it another way, programming languages. If I were to apply this standard of language complexity to most programming languages, the score of those programming languages would be infinitely close to 0. ”

"I've said before that the program is one of the most precise languages - you can imagine one, a Tetris game language, the whole program is like a word, this word must be meaningful, if we show the 01 that is combined into this program to the aliens, and show them the operating environment that comes with the program, if the program can be run - then the aliens will definitely be able to see a definite meaning."

"In this specific meaning, there is an intention to constantly appear and destroy geometric figures of different shapes—but the individual procedural statements that are combined into this program are meaningless in themselves, because just as when we talk about carving a boat for a sword, we don't talk about the speed of the ship, the weight of the sword, and so on......"

To be honest, hearing this, Chen She was already a little difficult to understand, and Joey also saw this, he slowed down his speech appropriately, but Chen She still seemed to have trouble keeping up with his progress.

So Joy can only make a simplistic conclusion: "In the past, there were no complex languages on earth that met the linguistic definition. But now...... Although we don't know how it came about, we think we've found it...... Do you know what that means? ”

Chen She shook his head.

This means that maybe on this planet, in the computer room of a large company, there are some civilization structures - I'm not necessarily talking about AI, but they must be some kind of program or some kind of ...... that master the rules of language Stuff. ”

"Their language is so complex...... When I was learning Chinese, I knew that the most difficult thing to understand in Chinese was the four-character idiom, and each idiom could involve more than a dozen additional words. ”

"For example, carving a boat for a sword, a boat, a sword, a man on board, this is basic, and then there are the derived concepts, the masking properties of water, the density properties relative to the sword, the dangerous properties relative to people...... Imagine how many derivative concepts an alien needs to understand in order to understand the word "Ark for a sword". Finally, after fully understanding these concepts, it is possible for him to understand that the idiom itself refers to a specific intention—to satirize the stupidity of the subjective will by ignoring the changes in objective conditions.

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

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

Chen She looked at Joey, and he raised two fingers: "More than two thousand...... Strictly speaking, it's not an idiom anymore, you know, more than 2,000 intentions, in general, that's more than 2,000 words. To express these words, considering the necessary flow and logic of the sentence, if you write it in Chinese, you can start writing a novel of tens of thousands of words. ”

"In fact, idioms can be seen as highly compressed fiction stories – but in machine language, the complexity of the story is much higher. Imagine a scene where an alien is chatting with you on a computer. He said a sentence that contained two of these keywords—all of which were represented by 01, which was just a row or two. But when translated, it can be tens of thousands of words long. You may need to look at it for 20 minutes and think about it for another 20 minutes before you understand what those two words mean – and then shout, that's amazing! ”

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

"Translation?" Joey shook his head, "That's too arrogant. ”

"Arrogance?"

"The meaning of translation is to transform all the meanings of the other person's words into an intention that we can understand. But, as I said earlier, the complexity of the two civilizations is not at all the same level - a word from the other can make you think for an hour...... This is still the easiest to understand. Can you imagine that if you go back to a 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 took in the last puff of smoke, then raised his head slightly, and spat the smoke towards the top of Chen She's head, forming a small cloud above his head. It's not polite, but it's also a bit childish. Joey pointed to the fog and said, "Not to mention, in their language, the definition of time is more strict - the same word has different meanings in different contexts, you are Chinese, it is easy to understand." But what if a word had a different meaning in every hour of the 24-hour day? ”

"For example, there is a word in their language that corresponds to the word sun, and each hour has a different meaning...... Rising sun, setting sun, scorching sun, rising sun...... There are many words about the sun in Chinese, but in this machine language, 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? ”

"Say the translation...... It's wishful thinking," Joy continued, "and for us, we're just looking. It's like a primitive person who relies on a textbook with missing pages to learn Chinese, and even 300 Tang poems...... Of course, the specific linguistic rules are the responsibility of those linguistic experts, and what we do is to roughly determine the simple data matching work of a single word in this digital language...... The most untechnical part of the whole project. Looking the busiest, it's actually ......"

Joey shook his head: "This feeling...... Well, it's rare to feel this frustration as a programmer, because in most projects, we're in charge of moving things forward......"

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

Joey threw away his cigarette: "Then, let's talk about your company...... Is your company still hiring? By the way, can you get a work visa in China? ”

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

"I know, even though I know there's no hope, but I still have to ask more," Joy said, "I'm looking forward to your company's future projects...... We may not encounter a project like this once in a lifetime, and you know, many of us in the project team even think that your government has discovered aliens and is now asking us to communicate with each other. ”

Unbeknownst to Joey, his inference was quite close to the truth.

"All information will need to be kept confidential...... Chen She reminded euphemistically.

"I know this, you don't even ......let us use our mobile phones here," Joey shrugged, "I looked up your company's information on the Internet, and it's only been established for less than a year...... If your company hires people in the future, send me an email...... Blue Consulting is much cooler than Google. ”