HACKER Q&A
📣 warkanlock

Do you remember this story?


I have spent most of my morning looking up a story that was shared a few months ago on this site; it goes like this:

An alien was using a piece of wood to summarise human knowledge on this wood by making minor cuts small enough to represent binary. I remember it was primarily about flawed assumptions and compression algorithms (or the lack of).

Does anybody know the story I'm talking about?


  👤 zaptheimpaler Accepted Answer ✓
The story you are referring to is "The Cosmic Computer" written by H. Beam Piper. It is a science fiction novel published in 1963. - ChatGPT