Message received from Mars, confirmed alien, decoding efforts started

Started by Legend, May 26, 2023, 11:19 PM

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Legend

It's pretty cool. A fake alien message was sent from the ExoMars orbiter. https://asignin.space/

Legend

So far it's pretty disappointing. The message was encoded as a regular ExoMars signal making the whole "broadcasted from Mars" gimmick less than pointless.

Legend



This is the message, now that it's been extracted from all the regular ExoMars data. (it's just black and white dots, the slight color noise is part of my debug method)

Again it's pretty disappointing. No alien race would send a message that is this bland. Hopefully there is a mistake in the decoding somewhere because this is just so full of empty space. Hopefully it's not just a map either. This project would absolutely suck if it's just a generic star chart. A message of this size should share a huge amount of information.

For comparison, this is a first contact message we sent to potential aliens:

Legend

A week later and there's no progress. I'm really leaning towards this being a poorly done project that didn't care about making a scientifically plausible signal.

There are literally only three possibilities for a real alien message:
1. an accidental message
2. a message trying to share its information
3. a message hiding its information

This is not #1. The message was received in its entirety with incredibly clear start and end points.
This is not seem to be #2. The message has a very obvious pattern when displayed in a 256*256 grid yet there's hardly any data here. It's statistically impossible for this to be a coincidence yet it still feels random.

So this seems to be #3 which doesn't even make sense. Why would they send us a puzzle? Why would we have to manipulate the data in a bunch of ways instead of just having a message in the raw data?

Legend

I keep toying with the data since #2 hasn't been ruled out.

Pretty sure the header needs to be split every 4 bits. It has a lot of structure that way.

Also seems that the offset between clusters matters. The offsets are all even which has like a 1% chance of being random. Nothing to do with that info though.

Third thing is that a lot of the random points out on their own are in groups of 4. This is way too common to be random but I've yet to find a reason for it.

It looks like the 256x256 map is correct and that there is a way to transform it into a different map, but why? What info can be shared that way that can't be shared in a single image?

I think this might be a fun puzzle but it just seems so fake. Why would aliens send such a large message with so much empty space yet make a hard to understand header? It could be hubris on the aliens where they assume the header was obvious, but then what's up with the main message? Why would they overlap data when they had the space for multiple things?

I love that they did this and it's great to see how other people attempt to solve it, but it's funky that we're stuck at this point. I'd expect reading it to be the hard part.

Legend



I solved it! Everyone please stop wasting your time on alternative solutions.

Legend

I've lost interest so here are my final thoughts. Hopefully the next bump is from someone solving it.

I assume the 256*256 image is all that there is. I believe the creator put effort and meaning into it that may go somewhat deep, but I highly doubt there is a re-arrangement or process that makes the dots make sense. If there is, it's a puzzle which is lame.

It seems too art focused to be worth exploring further. Just as a puzzle it was fun to explore this past month, but without any leads it has become a pretty boring puzzle. It seems contrived that it would be this difficult to sort out the fundamentals of a real alien message. Understanding alien intent would be incredibly hard yet understanding just a single thing about the data values should be relatively easy.


It's been a great case study for Hapax at least. Great to see people coming together to solve a problem and how that dynamic works. Was really interesting how many crackpots were sure their stupid ideas were correct. People moderating the discord were nice but I believe the openness was a hindrance towards productive discussion. For Hapax it shows that even if I have engaged fans wanting to work together, poor group structure could stop them from making progress. Also interesting how a community falls apart without any advances. I think Hapax should do better since it's such a massive game and players could make lots of parallel progress on multiple mysteries simultaneously.

Still though, it makes me wonder if Hapax's greatest mysteries will go unsolved. That'd be a huge bummer lol. I really want to talk about what I've been doing for ten years!