On mental models of structure

Advanced alien races are probably using the same data-structures as us.

The questions whether we are the only ones in the universe with sentience are perhaps as old as our civilization itself… Over the ages through progress of our own mental-models of Science, Math and Philosophy our models of the alien form has evolved too… Starting in the late 19th century, with Nikola Tesla’s attempt to make contact with Martians via radio waves, we have continued to hopefully listen to the cosmos and broadcast our own messages via radio-telescopes through projects like the Project Phoenix and the SETI project.

A mental exercise in finding common ground

If we ever encounter aliens, what commonalities can we expect to share with them? Will they be carbon based forms? Will they share out understanding of matter and the periodic-table? Will they comprehend our decimal number system?

The alien models of linguistics will likely be very different from ours and so would their models of Biology, Physics and Chemistry. Alternative periodic tables exist even here on Earth and it has been hypothesized that non-carbon based life-forms may exist in the universe.

What we normally think of as ‘life’ is based on chains of carbon atoms, with a few other atoms, such as nitrogen or phosphorous,We can imagine that one might have life with some other chemical basis, such as silicon. — Stephen Hawking, Life in the universe.

For the aliens to be able to crack interstellar travel and visit us must mean that their models of Physics is at least a much more advanced form of ours ..for them to have figured out that E = mc² and then gone on decipher wormholes instead of creating WMDs would be no small feat. This is also known as Fermi’s paradox which theorizes that the reason that intelligent life forms cannot find each other is that they destroy themselves before they can can figure out where they are in relation with the others..

If we were to rummage through an alien space-craft what artifact could we possibly find that we could immediately understand and appreciate?

Their tech would likely be more advanced to us than a smartphone to a neanderthal..their biology and language may be indecipherable too.. There is one thing however that we’ll likely find and be able to immediately understand and decipher.

For them to have found us they must have had a map.. And the map would likely be a graph with places of interests marked as vertices.

In the context of the cosmos finding Earth must be like finding a needle in a haystack. In order to visit Earth, they must have had elaborate maps right up to the nearest wormhole in our Galaxy (assuming our models of space travel).

If we ever meet intelligent life forms from another part of the universe, they’ll likely know, understand and recognize the same basic data structures we have in our computer science books. — Salvatore Sanfilippo, The Redis Manifesto

But will the aliens be able to do Math?

The idea of forming efficient structures for organization is intuitive to intelligent beings and do not necessarily need an understanding of Math.

Can the ant do Math?

The structures of information theory are however not bound by such considerations. The ant colony knows how to form efficient linked-list structures to get from one branch to another without having any understanding of Mathematics or formal reasoning.

Animals on Earth know how to organize into efficient structures.

Most life forms on Earth have an abstraction for society. The society that forms in groups and in doing so acquires a network intelligence. Through this network intelligence they stop being dumb animals and start forming optimal structures, the efficiency of which for a particular task can often often be proven mathematically even by our current arguably limited models of Mathematics. Let’s consider some basic structures of organization that are ubiquitous among animals on earth and we can expect the aliens to have the same understanding of mathematical structures as we do.

The List abstraction

The list is perhaps the most intuitive and most common transition from randomness to order found in nature. Often manifests in Information-theory as the array, the linked-list, the stack, the queue etc.

The List is a commonly ococuring structure .[Credits]

The list depending on how it’s modeled may allow for faster retrieval or insertions at the ends of an arbitrary positions. Animals will form a list structure when migrating, schools of fishes will form circular linked-lists in the oceans.

When we are standing in a supermarket checkout line we are forming a queue which allows for an efficient and fair system in which the person who enters first is served first. When we order our pillows on the bed we often form a tuple which is a form of list.

The Row/Column abstraction

The table structure is often seen in information theory as the two-dimensional array type. Several examples of structures can be found in nature too — the beehive can be modeled as tables where each which can be via a unique row-col index.

The table structure allows for dense storage and indexing of artifacts [Credits]

Relational databases also expose the same row-column structure where every entity can be modeled as a set of properties in columns and values for the properties as rows. In a table each cell can be accessed via the row and column index which allows O(1) for easy retrieval but insertion at an arbitrary positions may be more expensive operations.

The Graph abstraction

A graphs is a set of vertices connected by edges. From the spider’s web to world maps we can find implementations of graphs everywhere in the real world as well as on our computer models.

The graph (network of vertices connected via edges) is an intuitive way to model our universe.

Graph theory itself is a vast topic with many many implications. On computer models as on paper graphs can be implemented in multiple ways, The spider models a graph as it’s home and for catching prey. Humans often use graphs to model relationships and places on maps and connected entities.

Society as an abstraction for record-keeping and organization

Record-keeping and organization forms the basis of civilization and society. Actions can have consequences only when there are records that can be referenced to the actions. Those records are stored on paper or in computers, indexed and organized in easily retrievable formats via data structures.

People self-organizing into efficient structures represent society

Every system that we see around us be it the judiciary or the city municipality can be abstracted as entities that are tasked with keeping records in their scope of jurisdiction. The progress of civilization can be seen as new and inventive ways of record-keeping. The computing revolution digitized our record keeping, now the blockchain revolution is decentralizing it. Those records which moved from notebooks to centralized servers are now moving into a public ledger nodes secured via cryptography as the authority figures transform from being sole guardians and proprietors of the data into mere overseers of it.

Abstract structures for organization transcend time and evolution

We have been using data structures for information storage and retrieval long before we formalized the structures with Information Theory. The scoreboards in gladiator matches in Ancient Rome were probably maintained in lists and tables similar to how League of Legends servers store match records albeit on a different storage medium. In a thousand years from now, when our computing has changed so much that it will be hard to trace it back to the humble beginnings of today, we’ll still continue to implement the same abstract data types that we do now, in more efficient ways using better underlying algorithms and on faster hardware. Perhaps abstract mathematics and information theory is after all the shared truth transcending time and life itself.