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Can You Crack "Arecibo ASCII"?

Date: 20-Oct-2008/17:04

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UPDATE A fuller development of the Arecibo Ascii code is now available at http://uscii.hostilefork.com/
Every programmer who knows English is aware of the ASCII code, which declares that 65 means "A" and 66 means "B", etc. Yet there is nothing intrinsically "A-like" about the number 65 (binary: 1000001), nor anything B-like about the number 66 (binary: 1000010). To see that, just imagine living in the 1800s and this fell from the sky on a piece of paper:
1000001100001010000101000001
Even if you knew it was supposed to represent text, I think it would be impossible to read that as "ABBA" with any degree of confidence. You might be able to get a clue that 7-bit sections were significant if you had a large body of data and realized they were always multiples of seven in length, but any single signal like this would not be enough. You'd be in an especially bad position if you didn't know anything about alphabetical order (which isn't a strict prerequisite of being able to read or write English successfully)!
To address this, I created something called "Arecibo ASCII". It's named after the infamous Arecibo message--a binary sequence transmitted into space that tried to explain some things about humanity. The goal was to make as few assumptions about the receiving aliens as possible...only that they had an understanding of physics and math (and obviously, the ability to detect electromagnetic waves).
When Carl Sagan and Frank Drake composed the message, they took it to Richard Feynman without explaining to him what it was. They figured if Feynman couldn't decode it--given his upper hand of already knowing Earth science--then the aliens wouldn't have a chance! Luckily, Feynman got pretty much all of it.
In the spirit of that test, I'll send you an "Arecibo ASCII" message before I tell you how it works! :)
11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​01111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​10111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11011​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11101​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11110​10001​10001​10001​11111​10001​10001​10001​00000​00000​00111​01000​11000​11000​10111​00000​00000​00011​11100​00011​10000​01111​10000​10000​10011​11100​10000​10000​10100​01000​00000​01000​00000​01000​01000​01000​01000​01100​00100​00100​00100​00100​00100​01110​00000​00000​00111​01000​11111​11000​00111​10000​00000​00000​00000​00000​00000​00000​00011​11110​00010​00011​11010​00010​00010​00000​00000​00000​11101​00011​00011​00010​11100​00000​00000​10110​11001​10000​10000​10000​00100​00100​00100​10101​00110​00101​00100​10111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11011​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11101​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11110​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​01111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​10111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11011​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​11111​1110​
Want to test your alien-codebreaking-savvy? See if you can figure out what that says before you read the rest of the article! Otherwise, just read on as I spill the beans...

Symbols Of Prime Importance

The Arecibo message was transmitted as a straight sequence of binary digits. When you laid it out in a two-dimensional grid, you got a picture (the color is for instructional purposes only, it was effectively a 2-color bitmap):
Arecibo Message
The signal was chosen to be 1679 bits long, and this number was chosen for a reason. It is a semiprime...meaning it is a product of two primes (23 and 73). Thus, if you got the idea in your head to decode the bits as an image, there are only two natural ways of forming a rectangle. One as a series of 73 rows with 23 bits per row, or as a series of 23 rows with 73 bits per row.
I decided that Arecibo ASCII would use semiprimes as well. There's a magic number "35" hinted at in the bit pattern of my sample message, because every 36th bit is a zero. Also, it is prefixed and postfixed by unary expressions of the number 35. (There's no upper limit on how many you can tack on--arguably the more certain you want to hint at the "magic" of 35 in the message, the more you would want to add. But to meet the specification, a string merely needs one at the head and one at the end.)
So we have the mysterious appearance of 35, and the fact that the message length is always a multiple of 36. I'd say it's fairly natural to want to divide the message into segments of 36 bits. Then the zero that appears periodically every 36th bit can be assumed as some kind of delimiter...and probably not relevant to the message. So doing that to my transmission, we get:
11111111111111111111111111111111111  0
11111111111111111111111111111111111  0
11111111111111111111111111111111111  0
11111111111111111111111111111111111  0
11111111111111111111111111111111111  0
10001100011000111111100011000110001  0
00000000000111010001100011000101110  0
00000000000111110000011100000111110  0
00100001001111100100001000010100010  0
00000001000000000100001000010000100  0
01100001000010000100001000010001110  0
00000000000111010001111111000001111  0
00000000000000000000000000000000000  0
11111100001000011110100001000010000  0
00000000000111010001100011000101110  0
00000000001011011001100001000010000  0
01000010000100101010011000101001001  0
11111111111111111111111111111111111  0
11111111111111111111111111111111111  0
11111111111111111111111111111111111  0
11111111111111111111111111111111111  0
11111111111111111111111111111111111  0
11111111111111111111111111111111111  0
11111111111111111111111111111111111  0
Now we have 35 bits in each "unit". If we're anything like the alien scientists they hoped would receive the Arecibo message, then the semiprime number might lead us to make the leap toward decoding it as a rectangular grid. Further, we are given a bit of a hint by the blocks of all-1s...five at the beginning and seven at the end. :) Let's try laying it out in 7x5...
1000110
0011000
1111111
0001100
0110001
That's not anything too recognizable. How about the other way?
10001
10001
10001
11111
10001
10001
10001
That looks a lot like a letter "H" in a 5x7 bitmap font. Taking the next 35-bit series in the same way:
00000
00000
01110
10001
10001
10001
01110
You might say that's a lowercase "o", right? That's because in true blog vanity I made the first Arecibo ASCII message say "Hostile Fork". If you figured it out without reading the explanation first, then congratulations...and let me know about your experience!

The Arecibo ASCII Table Version 0.1 Alpha

Here's a first crack at an Arecibo ASCII table:
ASCIICharacterArecibo ASCII (35-bit binary)
10(return)00001000010010101101111110110000100
32(space)00000000000000000000000000000000000
33!00100001000010000100000000000000100
34"01010010100101000000000000000000000
35#01010010101111101010111110101001010
36$00100011111010001110001011111000100
37%11000110010001000100010001001100011
38&01100100101010001000101011001001101
39'01100001000100000000000000000000000
40(00010001000100001000010000010000010
41)01000001000001000010000100010001000
42*00000001001010101110101010010000000
43+00000001000010011111001000010000000
44,00000000000000000000011000010001000
45-00000000000000011111000000000000000
46.00000000000000000000000000110001100
47/00000000010001000100010001000000000
48001110100011001110101110011000101110
49100100011000010000100001000010001110
50201110100010000100010001000100011111
51311111000100010000010000011000101110
52400010001100101010010111110001000010
53511111100001111000001000011000101110
54600110010001000011110100011000101110
55711111000010001000100010000100001000
56801110100011000101110100011000101110
57901110100011000101111000010001001100
58:00000011000110000000011000110000000
59;00000011000110000000011000010001000
60<00010001000100010000010000010000010
61=00000000001111100000111110000000000
62>01000001000001000001000100010001000
63?01110100010000100010001000000000100
64@01110100010000101101101011010101110
65A01110100011000110001111111000110001
66B11110100011000111110100011000111110
67C01110100011000010000100001000101110
68D11100100101000110001100011001011100
69E11111100001000011110100001000011111
70F11111100001000011110100001000010000
71G01110100011000010111100011000101111
72H10001100011000111111100011000110001
73I01110001000010000100001000010001110
74J00111000100001000010000101001001100
75K10001100101010011000101001001010001
76L10000100001000010000100001000011111
77M10001110111010110101100011000110001
78N10001100011100110101100111000110001
79O01110100011000110001100011000101110
80P11110100011000111110100001000010000
81Q01110100011000110001101011001001101
82R11110100011000111110101001001010001
83S01111100001000001110000010000111110
84T11111001000010000100001000010000100
85U10001100011000110001100011000101110
86V10001100011000110001100010101000100
87W10001100011000110001101011010101010
88X10001100010101000100010101000110001
89Y10001100011000101010001000010000100
90Z11111000010001000100010001000011111
91[01110010000100001000010000100001110
92\00000100000100000100000100000100000
93]01110000100001000010000100001001110
94^00100010101000100000000000000000000
95_00000000000000000000000000000011111
96`01000001000001000000000000000000000
97a00000000000111000001011111000101111
98b10000100001000011110100011000111110
99c00000000000111110000100001000001111
100d00001000010000101111100011000101111
101e00000000000111010001111111000001111
102f00010001010010001110001000010000100
103g00000000000111110001011110000111110
104h10000100001000011110100011000110001
105i00000001000000000100001000010000100
106j00010000000001000010000101001001100
107k01000010000100101010011000101001001
108l01100001000010000100001000010001110
109m00000000001101110101101011010110001
110n00000000001011011001100011000110001
111o00000000000111010001100011000101110
112p00000000001111010001111101000010000
113q00000000000111110001011110000100001
114r00000000001011011001100001000010000
115s00000000000111110000011100000111110
116t00100001001111100100001000010100010
117u00000000001000110001100011000101110
118v00000000001000110001100010101000100
119w00000000001000110001101011010101010
120x00000000001000101010001000101010001
121y00000000001000101010001000010001000
122z00000000001111100010001000100011111
123{00011001000010001000001000010000011
124|00100001000010000000001000010000100
125}11000001000010000010001000010011000
126~00001011101000000000000000000000000
Bear in mind though it may seem like "just a 5x7 font", the important bit is that everyone writing documents use the same values. The Arecibo ASCII "A" equates to the decimal value 15,621,226,033 and looks like this:
01110
10001
10001
10001
11111
10001
10001
I've argued that this number is much more "A-like" than 65. Yet I'll point out that it isn't more A-like than similar patterns, like the one produced by 15,621,670,449:
01110
10001
10001
11111
10001
10001
10001
It's barely significant whether the cross bar of the A is on the 4th row or on the 5th row. Yet what makes this not a font is the agreement on a standard--just as with ordinary ASCII everyone needs to agree to use the same numbers! Then you can use those numbers to index into a properly stroked font. These bitmaps are a hidden cache of meaning and not meant to be drawn in ordinary circumstances!
Note I've also got a plan for "Arecibo UNICODE", that would use a larger pair of primes to represent more detail in the glyphs, such as adequately capturing Chinese characters. Once again the intent would not be to draw these bitmaps to the user--they'd be too pixelated. Yet it's interesting to note that you could fall back upon the bitmap on a machine that was missing that font. That way, you'd get something better than the notorious "<?>" that pops up when your system doesn't understand a character today...

What's it good for?

Whether you imagine such a thing could ever be useful...hopefully you at least think it's interesting. Especially if mathematicians who know English letters can consistently figure out short messages from a bare bitstream. A better test would be to avoid using the word "Arecibo" (so as to not give any hint that semiprimes and bitmaps play a part).
What first got me thinking about USCII was the rise of "literal URLs". Search engines prefer the URL to contain a description of what the link is about, such as how this article is called http://blog.hostilefork.com/can-you-crack-arecibo-ascii. Yet my time as a database programmer had led me to think it was almost always better to use abstract numbers in URLs. So I was confused on whether to embrace this new trend or not.
I started to see how using a purely abstract number is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you've lost the fluidity to make changes--if the URL for this article had been http://blog.hostilefork.com/2008/10/20/96/ then I can fix typos without breaking links (what if I'd spelled "arecibo" wrong and wanted to fix it?) On the other hand, imagine that someone hacks my server and puts up some kind of spam that has nothing to do with ASCII at all. In a system which isn't under centralized control, making linkages more "literal" helps protect us from from thinking the person who made the inbound link was purposefully trying to spam us.
This led me to ponder how "pure" the character codes themselves are. Right now we do rely heavily on tables to interpret numbers. If you get [89 69 83] then what do you do if one table says:
89→"Y", 69→"E", and 83→"S"
...while the other table says:
89→"N", 69→"O", and 83→"!"?
Fortunately ASCII is small, but UNICODE has over 100,000 symbols. If the numbers had some truth to them--or in them--your belief would be bolstered that you were at least decoding the message as it was intended.

Acknowledgements

I took the 5x7 font data from the Font Code for PIC CPU Assemblers. (Still, I'll reiterate that it's best to not think of Arecibo ASCII as a "font". Rather, it is a canonization of a font such that its numeric representation becomes a standard for information interchange.)
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