Arrival's Designers Crafted a Mesmerizing Alien Alphabet (2016)

> But consultations with linguists and graphic designers kept leading to fictional alphabets that Vermette says hewed too closely to familiar systems like hieroglyphics, or code. It felt too human. Then one night, Vermette’s wife, artist Martine Bertrand, offered to sketch some ideas. The next morning, Vermette came downstairs to find 15 inky logograms on the kitchen table. "I said, 'eureka.'"

I mean it sounds like Martine was the one who invented it! Let’s talk with her!

If the aliens from Arrival landed in 2023, perhaps we would be generating our replies with a finetuned Stable Diffusion model.[0]

[0] https://github.com/siraben/heptapod-diffusion

I enjoyed Arrival and recently learned that the movie was based off a short story by Ted Chiang, "Stories of Your Life And Others".

I recently read his other book, "Exhalation" and wholeheartedly recommend it.

For me, one of the beautiful subtexts in the movie was Adams' remembrances of dreams of horses, where it wasn't explicit whether it was the aliens expressing the images to her, or she was summoning the feeling of communing with another being, using that experience as a tool to open her mind to what the beings were expressing to her. It captured the feeling of synesthesia very well. Between Arrival and Interstellar, the potential of movies to express incredibly complex ideas with new visual metaphors seems to finally be coming into form.

I liked the movie and enjoyed the visual pretext of the communication, although it always felt not very credible to me from a logical standpoint.

I would expect two intelligent species intending and willing to communicate to form an increasingly complex communication scheme starting from basic principles.

Of course, this wouldn't have translated into a decent plot by itself.. :/

The team has a GitHub repo:

https://github.com/WolframResearch/Arrival-Movie-Live-Coding

looks like a form of gallifreyan to me, except more like chinese than european

Enjoyed the movie very much, but have issues with how Heptapod communication is portrayed. For one thing, they have two modes of language, purely verbal and purely written. Well, what do they do if they want to write down someone's speech verbatim, or tell someone verbally exactly what is written?

(2016)