Bible Design Specifications

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Bible Design Specifications

Posted by Robert Billing on 1998-03-31

 1) Requirement.

  To develop a means of transmission of the gospel message to the human
race.

 2) Restrictions

  The required solution will require a high degree of fault-tolerance,
as the target system is currently badly corrupted. This corruption is a
direct consequence of malicious system intrusion, which will be
referred to as the "Eden Incident".

 3) Available hardware

  a) One earth-type planet with a surface gravity of 1 gee.
  b) One sentient species.

  On initial inspection (a) seems to be in working order, although
overdue for PM, (b) has lost most of its internal communication links,
and will have to be addressed as a series of separate systems, rather
than a cohesive network.

 4) Proposal

  An indirect approach it to be preferred. Rather than simply sending
messages of the general form, "God says this," it will be better to
construct a substantial body of text, perhaps around 5Mb in extent, in
which the message is delivered in many different forms. Prophetic
messages may be useful during the bootstrap phase, in order to get the
"chosen" subsystem up & running, but are in general more prone to
malfunction (the "false prophet" effect).

  The bulk text method is to be preferred as it is tolerant of a
substantial degree of corruption. In general it is possible to extract
the signal from as little as 5% of the original text, and to tolerate
s/n ratios as bad as 10:1, although in practice 1000:1 should be
achievable.

  Design and construction of the bulk text should bear in mind the
problems of porting to the diverse subsystems of the human race.
However there are some points of similarity between subsystems which
will work to our advantage. These mainly derive from the shared
biochemistry of all the subsystems, which function in the same
ecosystem.

 The following design constraints should therefore be imposed on the
coders:

  1) Poetry must be amenable to translation, and therefore should depend
    on devices other than rhyme and metre. Paralellism is to be
    preferred (and is available under GPL at low cost).

  2) Imagery should be drawn from human bichemistry, not particular
    local setups. "Safe" imagery includes:

     a) Eating & drinking
     b) Sickness & health
     c) Marriage & procreation

    Imagery drawn from agriculture is reasonably safe, but should be
    used sparingly as some of the target subsystems are hunter-gatherers,
    and others have a highly mechanised agriculture.

  3) Critical points, such as your proposed death, should be reported
    by three or more, but not more than ten, different agents. This
    will ensure integrity of the signal, without introducing confusion
    at the target.

 5) Time to delivery

  Initial coding can begin at once, using your in house staff. I
suggest that they begin with something to handle the system logs from
creation and the "Eden Incident". Once this has been done I suggest
using Ur of the Chaldees as the primary bootstrap, then downloading the
rest of the startup code via Mt Sinai. Please note that Health & Safety
regulations (and proper concern for the safety of your staff) require
that the Mt Sinai area will have to be evacuated, except for the one
protected operator, while the link is powered.

  Delivery will then be phased as the "Chosen" system is run up, until
the critical events in Palestine. The final delivery, including the
last patches to the running system, will be via the Patmos link, about
1200-1500 years later.

  After the last download to Patmos has been delivered the coding
operation may be shut down, apart from some support as the product is
ported to the various subsystems of the human race.

  6) Fees

   a) Coding phase. 1500 years at the normal hourly rate....

!!Transmission Interrupted!!