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Comment by disssonant | Hacker News Reader

Oh, but the polygonal "analysis" overlayed on that circular splotch with the drip marks as an alien's "handwriting" example is corny beyond words.

Correlating an arbitrary set of points on splashy drippy smears, and eureka! It's a symbol for the global landing sites across seven continents?

Yeah right. That leap in counter-intuitive conceptualization is on the level of bat shark repellant, or Roland Emerich's super computer viruses for alien spaceships, as used by Wil Smith and Jeff Goldblum.

Those ink spatters look like droplets sprayed by an airbrush, with no control exerted, leaving a disorganized sprawl of drip marks. Why the clustered focus of points in one area over another?

Cognitive dissonance and hand wavey science. But movies are movies.

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To me, the intent in the movie was pretty obvious: specific polygonal clusters attached to the circle act something like radicals in kanji, but with even more components that can be built into a single 'word'.

Your complaint strikes me like complaining that kanji calligraphy (for example: https://i.imgur.com/wHdqJIF.jpg) obviously can't mean anything because it's just splashy ink marks.

The circle reminds me of consistent hashing. The most popular method is to make a circle and place nodes at different points along the circumference.

A circle is an elegant way to encapsulate a lot of information in a compact symbol. These aliens could be really good at detecting angles. If their eyes have cones polarized at different angles, shapes placed at different points on the circle could appear to be written in different colors to them. That would be just as natural as words written in a line are to us. Fascinating stuff.

> Roland Emerich's super computer viruses for alien spaceships

A (unfortunately) deleted scene explains this; our computers are based on reverse-engineered alien technology. We're both effectively running the same architecture.

Hmm, architecture can mean two things: general structure (e.g. Harvard, Von Neumann etc.) or specific machine type (i386, ARM4). It's plausible that we would have the same architecture in the first sense but not in the second (where we have seen great diversity and evolution).

That's true.

My pet theory was that the invaders had no concept of computational security - the first movie makes it clear that they're telepaths, and a telepathic society might not have any need for software-based access restrictions. They might not even have the concept of locks. So any transmissions they had would be unencrypted, and would probably consist of a header that says something like "execute the following X bytes of code: <payload>", which any system would accept and attempt to execute.

With an architecture like that, reverse-engineering it would be much easier than trying to get through encryption and access-control based system (although you'd still have to figure out how the executables work.) But hey, David was a genius.

I think you've got to reverse-engineer their protocol/data format before the issue of authentication even comes to light, it's naturally something layered on top of that.

I have to say Jeff Goldblum is way more convincing as a hyperintelligent but nerdy romantic lead than whoever they cast in Arrival.

I think you misunderstood a bit. The circular symbol is not correlated to the landing sites in any way. It's just a example of the alien's writing system, which large parts of the movie centers around deciphering.

It's a pretty good movie, i can recommend watching it.

To me, they looked strikingly like the circles people draw as a Zen exercise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ens%C5%8D

(Not too similar to how they were described in the story.)

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