Weird.

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The Tic Xenotation

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 AM