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Comment on You can ask any question to the people of year 3000, but can only receive information in the form of a single bit. What's your question?

DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

There’s actually a way to make a question so that you can receive 3 possible answers

0, 1, or [No Response]

Or depend on how soon they have to send the answer, more info can be replayed if the the bit was sent to 1PM and it can mean a different meaning if that same bit was sent to 5PM

So you can actually just write one LONG quesrion that list out a bunch of answers like a multiple choice question:

If answer is [Response A], send “0” to 1PM, if answer is [Response B], send “1” to 1PM, if answer is [Response C], send “0” to 2PM, if answer is [Response D], send “1” to 2PM, if no response, we’ll assume ur dead, from the options aforementioned, What [Question Here]?

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Ediacarium@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Once you’re able to use time as an information, they can send a message with a character limit. For every letter they need to wait:

Remaining Message Length^Alphabet Size*Index of Letter*time interval

So, if future people want to sent the message hello and our time unit is 1s, and the max message length is 5, they need to send the bit to exactly 26^4*7+26^3*4+26^2*11+26^1*11+26^0*14=3276872 seconds or 54614,5333min or 910,242222h or ~38 days after the start time.

We can choose smaller time intervals, but with a long enough message, we’ll eventually reach the year 3000 again. Alternatively, we can move the start time into the past, at the expense of quite a few possible messages.

This is effectively the same problem as trying to map an n-dimensional array to a one dimensional array.

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- DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Nah, “aaaaa”, “bbbbb”, and “zzzzz” doesn’t need to be one of the “multiple choices”
  
  Don’t spell each letter of each word, just use words to “spell out” the sentence instead.
  
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  - Ediacarium@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    If you’re not asking about anything that we currently don’t have a word for, we can use words as the alphabet, sure.
    
    We then need to transmit a list of words, they’re allowed to use, otherwise our count is off, because I’m sure that 974 years from now english won’t be the same, as it is today. They’ll have a lot more skibid rizz than we do now.
    
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    DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    use Chinese xD
    
    logographic languages tend to last longer, especially now all the characters are digitized.
    
    A “Computer” didn’t exist in ancient times, but they still used words that have always existed to create new compound words: 电脑 (“Electric” + “Brain”). Airplanes didn’t exist but they still have 飞机 (“Flying” + “Machine”)
    
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- bacon_pdp@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  Wrong. Assuming 6bit and one bit per minute; a 3 char start and stop sequence. 1024 character message could be sent per 4.3 days. Or a faster response time than my ex.
  
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  - Hjalamanger@feddit.nu ⁨50⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    You can’t send bits at a constant rate in this case. You essentialy get to send one very large number, the amount of time since your decided starting time (plus the one bit we were actually intended to use). The bit count grows logarithmicly with time
    
    Thus, the amount of bits n you can send over t time steps would be
    
    n = log(t)/log(2) + 1
    
    As an example, say they wait 8 seconds before sending you a 1. You have received the number 1000 and the bit 1. That’s a total of 5 bits.
    
    If they choose to wait twice as long, 16 seconds, they have in effect transmitted the numbers 10000 and one additional bit, a total of 6 bits. Double the time but only one additional bit.
    
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