Daniel C. Barker's Tic Xenotation emerged during the highly obscure phase of his life when he was working for 'NASA' (some hesitation is appropriate here) on the SETI-related 'Project Scar' in Southeast Asia, tasked with designing a 'general purpose decryption protocol' for identifying intelligent signal from alien sources.
This project necessitated the formulation of numeric conventions independent of all cultural conditioning or local convention - radically abstract signs.
To take one wretched example, the movie Contact has ETI signal counting in pulses - with 101, for instance, consisting of a succesion of one hundred and one blips - a repugnantly stupid 'solution' that could only be considered acceptable - let alone 'intelligent' by coke-fried Hollywood brats.
Barker's Tic Xenotation (TX), in marked contrast, elegantly provided an abstract compression of the natural number line (from 2 ... n) with a minimum of coded signs and without modulus. It remains the most radically decoded semiotic ever to exist upon the earth, although exact isomorphs of the TX have been puzzlingly discovered among certain extremely ancient anomalous artifacts (such as the Tablets of Jheg Selem and the Vukorri Cryptoliths).
Tic Xenotation works like this:
[I've used colons for Barker's tic dots and placed tic-clusters in quotes for clarity]
':' counts as '2' or 'x 2', with a value exactly equivalent to '2' in a factor string
So:
':' = 2, '::' = 4, ':::' = 8
The second notational element consists of implexions, where '(n)' = the nth prime.
Implexion raises the hyperprime index of any number by 1. Examples (from the hyprime 'mainlain'):
'(:)' = 3 (2nd prime),
'((:))' = 5 (3rd prime),
'(((:)))' = 11 (5th prime),
'((((:))))' = 31 (11th prime)
'(((((:)))))' = 127 (31st prime)
Numbers constellate as normal factor strings, i.e. 55 (5 x 11) is tic xenotated as '((:))(((:)))'
Note 1. TX accounts for all naturals with a value of 2 or higher.
In order to reach back to zero, Barker added a 'deplex' operation, '-P'.
'(-P)' = lower hyprime index by 1, so: '(-P)(:) = :'. Thus 0 = '((-P)):'.
'(-P)' and '(+P)' perform elementary subtractions/additions that modify hyprime indices.
Note 2. A strange feature of the TX is that the natural number line has to be constructed synthetically.
Barker described such a list as the 'Tic Xenotation Matrix', whose first entries (corresponding to the decimal numerals) proceed:
[0] ((-P)):
[1] (-P):
[2] :
[3] (:)
[4] ::
[5] ((:))
[6] :(:)
[7] (::)
[8] :::
[9] (:)(:)
The wonders of the TX are manifold, but enough for now ...
Posted by at July 7, 2004 03:27 AMReza -
[in response to Solar Rattle q. on Note 2 above]
One thing I love about TX is that it turns numeracy upside down. Numbers can be notationally constructed with a high degree of understanding of their properties according to Euclid's first law of arithmetic ('every number has a unique factorization') but no idea where they belong on the natural number line.
E.g. which comes first:
'((((((:))))))' or '::::(:(::))'?
In this case, the second number is easier to reconstruct into decimal, since it is 2x2x2x2x the nth prime (where n is 2x the (2x2=) 4th prime (=7)). 14th prime = 43, so 2x2x2x2x43= 708
Yet even here, there is no way to identify
'(:(::))' as 43 except by reference to an implicit TX Matrix.
With the first number the situation is far more overt, what is 2 to the 6th hyprime power? Only by running throught the ordinal designations of the prime series can you find out - the TX number is intrinsically cryptic.
[PS. CRYPT = 127 = NUMBER].
In fact '((((((:))))))' is the 127th prime = 709.
So you can fully 'understand' the Barker notation, without any sense of natural ordinal sequence - even with two neighbouring numbers. There is a rhythmic instability to the natural progression, which is full of singularities, breaks and nonperiodic oscillations.
[Hope this responds appropriately to your q.]
Yes, this is very digestible ... thanks very much ... I’ll return to you. For now, let me explore it a bit more ... this indeed deserves much more attention.
Posted by: Reza at July 7, 2004 04:39 PMCalling Euclid's Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic the 'first law of arithmetic' was incredibly sloppy - written in a rush - sorry folks
Posted by: Nick at July 8, 2004 04:52 AM