> But consultations with linguists and graphic designers kept leading to fictional alphabets that Vermette says hewed too closely to familiar systems like hieroglyphics, or code. It felt too human. Then one night, Vermette’s wife, artist Martine Bertrand, offered to sketch some ideas. The next morning, Vermette came downstairs to find 15 inky logograms on the kitchen table. "I said, 'eureka.'"
I mean it sounds like Martine was the one who invented it! Let’s talk with her!
It is a good movie. But I feel the story it is based (from Ted Chiang) is superior. Some of the nuances in the story deals with (seeing life as a whole, inadequacy in conveying whole gamut of emotions, concepts in our day to day communication etc,) doesn't come out that well in the movie.
Interesting, I watched movie before reading the story, and personally I liked movie more. Story is different in narrative and in the conclusion.
Will be interesting to know is there a difference in a movie perception between peoples that read story first and people that come to movie without any idea what happens.
I guess this is one more data point: I read the story first, too, and liked it better than the film. The story ended with a certain ambiguity (in my mind, at any rate) that I took some time to think about, and which I enjoyed. The movie wrapped it all up a bit too neatly to my taste.
I watched the movie first, but enjoyed the written story more (though I still thought the movie was great!). The big difference for me was the inclusion of the physics in the written story, and how it was connected to the linguistics.
Arrival, The Martian, Moneyball, The Big Short, there's something magical about these movies that no matter how many times they are on TV I will just sit and watch them again. I don't know what it is about the stories but it probably has has something to do with that XKCD comic about the scene in apollo 13.
For me, one of the beautiful subtexts in the movie was Adams' remembrances of dreams of horses, where it wasn't explicit whether it was the aliens expressing the images to her, or she was summoning the feeling of communing with another being, using that experience as a tool to open her mind to what the beings were expressing to her. It captured the feeling of synesthesia very well. Between Arrival and Interstellar, the potential of movies to express incredibly complex ideas with new visual metaphors seems to finally be coming into form.
I liked the movie and enjoyed the visual pretext of the communication, although it always felt not very credible to me from a logical standpoint.
I would expect two intelligent species intending and willing to communicate to form an increasingly complex communication scheme starting from basic principles.
Of course, this wouldn't have translated into a decent plot by itself.. :/
Please follow the site guidelines. I removed the rate limit from your account on the assumption of good faith (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36719915) and don't want to revert that, but if you keep posting like this we'll end up having to.
Hey remember a month ago when we had a huge thread with dozens or maybe even hundreds of comments about how interesting and thoughtful were the works of the unabomber? I wonder what all those commenters are up to I wonder what you might find if you follow some of them around for a few days.
I wonder if they have any overlap with the folder of screenshots I have of users here advocating eugenics, colonialism, or infanticide. I truly can't guess either way.
Pointing the finger at other people doesn't alter whether you're following the rules or not. If you don't to get rate limited or banned, please follow the rules regardless of how bad other comments are or you feel they are.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Not sure what to think of this, as in sarcastic sense...?
It's not like we're discussing trite software, I was just discussing about the "plot device" here where the decoding of an arbitrary language with complex symbology is a central feature. Doesn't it feel "forced" to you in the same way action movies show absolutely unrealistic martial arts moves for the sake of entertainment, or watching most "hackers" in computer movies?
Wouldn't you agree that starting form the absolute basics would be a much sound/quicker way to come to a unambiguous shared vocabulary instead of just showing complex blots to another species and expecting them to decode it? It's also especially odd to me that the somehow the host civilization is doing the decoding part. Considering contact from a supposedly more advanced civilization, I would almost expect the opposite to be true, where the aliens would likely take most of the burden of establishing communication (and probably already did so by watching/listening).
But I get it.. I still enjoyed the movie (like I can still enjoy action movies or computer movies)...
I get where you're coming from but the main thing in the story is that the aliens' perception of time was very different from that of humans; they could perceive their entire life at any given time. Given that, if the aliens could not imagine that humans only had this limited perception, the aliens would have thought the humans should already have known how their language worked...or something like that, miscommunication due to differences etc.
Enjoyed the movie very much, but have issues with how Heptapod communication is portrayed. For one thing, they have two modes of language, purely verbal and purely written. Well, what do they do if they want to write down someone's speech verbatim, or tell someone verbally exactly what is written?
I think it one point in the movie they explicitly say that there is no correlation between what an alien says and what they write. They further say that because it's not a transcription of speech, the writing is not "bound by time". Utterances have a start and an end, heptapod writing ipso facto does not.
It's possible too that the alien utterances are purely gestural, and don't involve language in the same sense as the logograms.
I mean it sounds like Martine was the one who invented it! Let’s talk with her!