El código secreto para las naves espaciales

El código secreto para las naves espaciales

Las ni </div> <div class= article last updated June 4, 2018
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The signals Voyager sent to Earth to give us these pictures looked something like this:

. . . 1101 0010 1001 0101 0000 1011 0001 . . .

How did we ever make enough sense of these 1's and 0's to get these magnificent images?


Spacecraft engineers and computer scientists have had to solve many big problems. But none of these problems could be tackled without one thing: a special language so people could communicate with machines. That language makes . . .

  • Spacecraft seem very smart.

  • The huge dish antennas that pick out the spacecraft's signal from millions of miles away seem very smart.

  • The computers that decode and process the signals into pictures seem very smart.

But none of these machines can learn English, or Spanish, or any other human language the way people can. These machines understand only two ideas:

Cartoon light switch turns on and off with mouse hover.

So the big question is.

How do we feed complicated information IN and get complicated information OUT, if we can only say "ON" and "OFF"?

Let's find out!