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Mestroyer comments on Just One Sentence - Less Wrong
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"Most diseases are caused by tiny little mindless creatures the reproduce and spread quickly and live in sick people's bodies, and quite a few of them can be killed be a certain mold that you can grow on bread."
Hmm, how many "and's" can I put in this one sentence? This reminds me of a competition for extra credit in one of my CS classes to write a C++ program in "as few statements as possible," where I took the obvious algorithm, completely unrolled the loop, and used logical connectives to stick every statement together into one. I skipped class the day the winner was announced, and the teacher later said he changed the rules and let the class vote for a winner, which wasn't me.
I like to think about initial application of this sentence.
"How old is this bread? A week? You fool! Look at how sick he is! Get some two-week bread immediately, and feed it to him as fast as you can! NO TIME FOR CHEWING."
Your competition story qualifies you for an upvote, for munchkinry.
It's a pretty good idea for a sentence, too.
Well, if cheating is allowed, you'd want to find some way to compress more information into this. For example, you could somehow take advantage of the medium of sentence delivery.
"Please divide the length of this sentence by the length of the stone block it is written on and convert to base 26 in order to reveal a code which can be cyphered using the obvious number-to-letter mapping"
If this works like I think it will, you should now be able to convey an extremely large amount of information in plain english - constraints being set by the maximum length of the stone block and the accuracy of your measuring and cutting tools.
The best thing about this is that more of the message gets revealed as the society's measuring tools get more accurate...so you can time the release of information, putting more advanced or potentially dangerous information closer to the end. The downside is that if anything happens to the original stone before humanity 2.0 achieves the required measuring proficiency, the society loses any undecoded messages.
I don't think it would be feasible to encode even half a dozen letters with that technique.
Assuming my math is right, if your stone carving were accurate to 1 micron, in order to encode a 140 character 'tweet' using this method, you would need a stone tablet 10^163 times larger than the observable universe. (!)
ugh...I just did a rough estimate for the same problem with clocks...it's not much better. So much for that idea!
I wonder if there is a way to use math to squeeze more digits out of this situation...
Well, what are you trying to compress the information into, exactly? If you're trying to compress it into "one sentence", surely the easiest way is just to use the word "and" a lot. If you want to embed lots of sentences in it, then say something along the lines of "the sentence encoded by the number 1775926438157057167957252 is true, and the sentence encoded by the number 478910336475999172548926174999937 is true, and..."
That's exactly what I would've done!