“That there has to be some kind of intelligence behind it all?” Beth said, leaning forward behind Keene.
Naarmegen glanced back at her. “Right. They’ve even devised objective ways of recognizing it.” He looked at Keene again. “Did Sariena tell you about that?”
“I haven’t really talked to her that much,” Keene confessed. “Too wrapped up in nuclear plasmas and induction physics for most of the time.” But he was interested. “Of recognizing what? Do you mean the results of intelligence at work?”
Naarmegen nodded, hanging onto a handrail. “Exactly.”
“Objective ways,” Keene repeated.
“Yes.”
“Okay, so how would I recognize it?”
Naarmegen made a gesture in the air that could have meant anything. “When you or I see something that’s been organized the way it is for a purpose—like the parts of a machine, or the codes in one of those processors behind you—we don’t have any difficulty distinguishing it from the results of pure, unguided, physical processes. So how do we do it? There’s obviously something we latch onto. Is it possible to identify what it is, even define some rules for measuring it—and then apply them to the natural world and see how it scores?”
Which would certainly be the way to go about it, Keene could see—if it could be made to work. “Is that what the Kronians have done?”
“Yes.”
“How?” Maria asked, beside Beth.
“Okay, let’s take an example.” Naarmegen thought for a moment. “Did you ever play that game they used to have, where you made words out of letter tiles and got double and treble scores on the good places? What was it called . . . ?”
“Scrabble?” Keene said.
“Yes, that was it. So suppose you found a jumble of tiles on the floor that said absolutely nothing at all. You’d have no reason to think they’d been arranged, right? If you had to guess, you’d say they got spilled and just fell that way.”
“All right,” Maria agreed.
“But now imagine you come across, let’s say, a hundred tiles all lined up, and they spell out a sentence from a book that you know. You wouldn’t hesitate to say that someone arranged it. It’s kind of obvious.” Naarmegen waved his free hand in the air. “But why is it obvious? What’s different that you’ve picked out? Can you put your finger on it?”
There was a short pause. “It’s too improbable,” Beth offered finally. “More complex.”
Naarmegen’s mouth split into a toothy grin behind his beard, and he nodded as if he had been expecting that answer. “Complex, yes,” he agreed. “But more complex? No. Every arrangement of a hundred tiles is as improbable as any other.”
“True,” Keene agreed.
“The second one—the sentence—contains more information,” Beth tried.
“Does it? But you’d need just as much information to construct any of the other sequences too. In fact, if they were random, you’d probably need more. You’d have to specify every letter. There’s no way to compress a random string.”
Beth shook her head. “No, that wasn’t what I meant. I meant it conveys information in a different sense . . . in a language. It carries meaning.”
“Meaning to whom?”
“To me—anyone who speaks English.”
“What if someone doesn’t speak English? It wouldn’t mean anything to them.”
Beth thought about it. “It doesn’t matter. The meaning is still there. It’s still encoded in a specific way. Not knowing how to decode it is a separate issue.”
Naarmegen nodded slowly, giving all the others time to digest that. “Yes, you’ve hit it,” he said finally. “The key word is encode. It encodes—or specifies—meaning according to an independent system of rules whose purpose goes beyond simply specifying a sequence. The Kronians call that property ‘specificity.’ ”
“But you could still get some of that in the first example—the random one,” Maria pointed out. “English-language words, I mean. Small ones.”
“You mean like ‘it,’ or ‘so,’ or ‘and’?” Naarmegen said.
“Yes,”
“Why did you say they had to be small?”
“Well . . .” Maria shrugged. “They don’t have to be, I suppose. But you wouldn’t expect long ones.”
“Too improbable?”
“Yes, I’d say so. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Naarmagen made his gnomish grin again and looked back at her. “But we already said that any other string would be just as improbable anyway.”