Towards Universal Semantic Communication

摘要: Is is possible for two intelligent beings to communicate meaningfully, without any common language or background? This question has interest on its own, but is especially relevant in the context of modern computational infrastructures where setting up a common protocol between computers is getting to be increasingly burdensome, and where “universal communication protocols” may start to become attractive.In this paper we attempt to formalize this problem in a computational setting, where the goal of one of the interacting players is to gain some computational wisdom from the other player. We show that if the second player is “sufficiently” helpful and powerful, then the first player can gain significant computational power (deciding PSPACE complete languages). Our work highlights some of the definitional issues underlying the task of formalizing universal communication, but also suggests some interesting phenomena and highlights potential tools that may be used for such communication.