365 tomorrows

ALEX by Daniel Bensen is now up.

Alex

This has been a humbling experience.

I can admit now that I was a little arrogant. I suppose I had reason to be. I was—I suppose I still am—the best mathematician on Earth. Funny.

I know I should have expected this. But then, most of us believed then that mathematics was a universal language. I can’t say I ever held much stock in the notion, but the politicians thought so, and that is why they sent me. If you are listening to this, then I know you have read the reports, so I won’t bore you by going over the details.

Not bad. A little disjointed, maybe, but I'd expect that when you learn to think in a non-human way. I liked that.

I also liked the ending ... although I half expected it to end with "... and Cthulhu promised he would eat you and me last."

If I had to offer contructive advice, I'd offer two critiques:
1. To me, the title made no sense in context with the story. Can you explain your choice?
2. Trust the intelligence of your readers. Repeating the "humbling" comment wasn't, perhaps, necessary for your typical SF readers. Don't worry. We'll get it.

As someone who does advanced math for a living, there is something that is bothering me about this piece, but I can't put my finger on it. Overall, the idea is good and I liked the story, but there is something about the paragraph with "this is difficult to explain to a layman" that just doesn't sit right - the best that I can come up with is that the character's discussion of mathematics didn't feel genuine; if I had to guess I'd say that the author doesn't have advanced math knowledge. Maybe it was the comment about "running the numbers"... advanced math doesn't really involve numbers (numbers are way too simple and way too restrictive) and a mathematician wouldn't say that, even to try to explain to a layman, because it is too far from their core mentality. A physicist or an engineer might, but not a pure mathematician.

Pretty cool. I like the idea that this level of math has actually changed him as a being as he comes to understand it. Like maybe it's so powerful that to comprehend it's theory changes your biology. Oh, math.

I really liked this one. I think for me it was the way the aliens seemed so very alien. Often, when aliens communicate in stories they seem too much like us but using maths as a medium distanced them for me and I liked that.

Very true. Math and basic physics have been assumed to form a universal language for some time now, but it must be kept in mind how deeply wedded these ideas are to our global culture and physiology. Just look at the kind of confusion you get between metric and imperial systems these days (we have ten fingers for Christ's sake, not six). And that's still humans between humans!

I can't help but think that no matter how much we speculate and fictionalize, whatever is actually out there among the stars - even if it is just vast amounts of inanimate matter - is going to blow our minds something fierce.

Wow! Okay, I confess, this is the first thing I've written that's ever been published, and I am am a little shocked to see such great feedback. Thank all of you guys so much.

Well, it looks like I can't write replies to individual comments, so I'll quote people.



1. The title. Alex was the name of the African Gray parrot used in the animal behavior experiments of Irene Pepperberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)). I was reading her book _Alex and Me_, where she talks about Alex's unusually quick grasp of language (for a parrot) as a kind of "avian genius." The parrot's mental processes are so fundamentally different from ours, it takes an enormous leap on his part to produce a sentence like "that apple."
So in this story, the part of Alex is played by a human trying to communicate with aliens. On the other side, we can assume the alien has developed a strange attachment to its human subject and swears that there are times "he really understands me."
2. Okay. I suppose the repetition was an effort to bring the end of the story back into parallel with the beginning.

Yeees, that disjointedness was...totally intentional



Absolutely. And I apologize. I know it bugs me when people write inaccurate things about subjects I know about, but the truth is my math is nonexistent and I didn't do any research for this story. You'll notice I tried to avoid mentioning the math as much as possible, but I see I still gave myself away.

The reason I chose math as the medium of communication was a jibe at people who assume that our understanding of math is universal. I think our biology and history prejudices us toward math just as it does everything else.

So Sylme, what would you change? My goal was a series of puzzles or problems to solve that require enormous and fundamental shifts of perspective, and when solved communicate a message.


Like I said, I'm not a math person, but the people I know who are math people describe something like that. Not as in changing your biology, but changing the way you think in a very basic way. Apparently that's why mathematicians are crazy The closest thing I've experienced is learning a new language, but I think the mental changes associated with math are greater.


Thanks a lot! That was my goal.


(aside) The 6-based counting system is actually useful if you're counting on your fingers.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (on the left hand) 10 (hold up one finger on the right)
11, 12, 13, 14, 15 (on the left) 20 (hold up two fingers on the right)
and so on
You can count up to 50 (that is 30) with just your hands. Useful, I imagine, for Babylonian shepherds and the like. (/aside)
But more basic than that, I think until we meet aliens, it will be impossible to see in what ways our thinking is limited. How many ways are there to think about numbers? I'm suspecting more than we know.

I think that the base idea was good, but it was the delivery that was the problem - the view was too simplistic e.g. 'equations' and 'numbers' are highschool/early undergraduate level. I'd suggest changes along the following lines:
- change "running the numbers" to "looking at the problems"
- they wouldn't be "equations" they would be "problems" or "theorems" or "applications" or even "axioms"; if you insist on the idea elicited by equations, then "formulae" would be better
- having multiple solutions isn't a big deal... depending on how you interpret what is meant by x and a, the equation x^2+a=0 has *at least* two (correct) solutions, in the same vein, having no solution isn't a big deal either... Perhaps instead of "solution" you could have used an idea like "interpretation"?

I'm way behind on my comments...

I liked this one - the ending made me think of a scene in a Heinlein book where they thought the natives of a planet were just religious in the normal way, and then found that there were actual beings physically there bein worshipped - it was so humbling and they were so powerful it was... traumatic. Not a lot of *actual* similarity to the story, but the "good boy" thing made me think about it.

Okay. But aside from vocabulary is the basic premise still possible? I want this to be equivalent to a human determining whether a parrot can recognize shapes and colors. ("Alex: What color?" "red" "good boy!")

Thanks!

Absolutely! As I said, I liked the basic idea behind the story

Well, thanks a lot for your constructive criticism.