Comment on Just One Sentence

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 19:20:26 GMT

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.

Discuss