Skip to main content

languages - Are there any tools or code for analyzing Arrival logograms?


I've read in several places that Mathematica was used in some of the analysis of the language used in Arrival.


Do the logograms carry any actual meaning as a language, and if they do, are there any tools that can be used for analyzing or generating them?





Answer



The analysing part:


Christopher Wolfram, who was in charge of analysing the alien language, did a stream1 explaining the code he used.





Update: I have contacted the guys at Wolfram Foundations, and they responded. The code for the stream, along with 38 logograms with their meanings, can be found at GitHub, licensed with CC-BY-NC 4.0. I guess I have to retract my previous statement about Wolframs, though they could have made all this more accessible.


1: It's supposed to be available at the link, but it didn't start to play for me. One workaround for this is to create an account, and start a free PRO trial. That way you will be able to download the stream (1.4 Gigabytes).





The creating part:


To summarise, it appears that the logograms were hand-made by the creative team. Certain elements of those logograms have a defined meaning, that they share across different logograms.


Some background information about the creative process


There's a series of tweets by the writer/producer Eric Heisserer, which explain the creative process briefly.


It appears that the alien language was initially bound to be created by Patrice Vermette, the production designer. He was dissatisfied with his own work, so his wife, Martine Bertrand, helped him by designing 15 sketches.



[Vermette's original design] 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.'”
from Wired



Then the creative team made up a dictionary of those inky blots:




Vermette and his team assigned meaning to the inky tendrils that project from each ring, developing a dictionary of 100 symbols.
from Wired



So the actual language was invented without the science:



“We created a dictionary, a logogram bible,” [Vermette] said. “There’s 71 used in the final version of the movie, but we created over 100. They all make sense.”
from Inverse



And then the Wolfram people stepped in and brainstormed how all this could be made to look all sciency:




[Christopher Wolfram's] basic strategy was simple: just ask “if we were doing this for real, what analysis and computations would we be doing?”. We’ve got a list of alien landing sites; what’s the pattern? We’ve got geometric data on the shape of the spacecraft; what’s its significance? We’ve got alien “handwriting”; what does it mean?
from Stephen Wolfram's blag



Here are some pictures apparently showing the code used to analyse the writings and other patterns related to aliens:


enter image description here


According to Stephen Wolfram, Christopher Wolfram (who coded all this stuff) just received the paintings from the creative staff and analysed them like a real linguist would:



The movie-makers were giving Christopher raw data, just like in real life, and he was trying to analyze it.


. . .



In the final movie, the screen visuals are a mixture of ones Christopher created, ones derived from what he created, and ones that were put in separately. Occasionally one can see code. Like there’s a nice shot of rearranging alien “handwriting”, in which one sees a Wolfram Language notebook with rather elegant Wolfram Language code in it. And, yes, those lines of code actually do the transformation that’s in the notebook. It’s real stuff, with real computations being done.


from Wolfram's blag



The generating part:


There's a related question on Mathematica SE - finding which we owe to @Rand al'Thor - that allows one to generate similar looking stuff. Though it doesn't create the actual logograms used in the film, I'd say they look pretty close:


enter image description here


Tinkering with the code and fiddling with the dials may yield some nice results.


Post in comments when done :P


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Did the gatekeeper and the keymaster get intimate in Ghostbusters?

According to TVTropes ( usual warning, don't follow the link or you'll waste half your life in a twisty maze of content ): In Ghostbusters, it's strongly implied that Dana Barret, while possessed by Zuul the Gatekeeper, had sex with Louis Tully, who was possessed by Vinz Clortho the Keymaster (key, gate, get it?), in order to free Big Bad Gozer. In fact, a deleted scene from the movie has Venkman explicitly asking Dana if she and Louis "did it". I turned the quote into a spoiler since it contains really poor-taste joke, but the gist of it is that it's implied that as part of freeing Gozer , the two characters possessed by the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper had sex. Is there any canon confirmation or denial of this theory (canon meaning something from creators' interviews, DVD commentary, script, delete scenes etc...)? Answer The Richard Mueller novelisation and both versions of the script strongly suggest that they didn't have sex (or at the very l...

Why didn't The Doctor or Clara recognize Missy right away?

So after it was established that Missy is actually both the Master, and the "woman in the shop" who gave Clara the TARDIS number... ...why didn't The Doctor or Clara recognize her right away? I remember the Tenth Doctor in The Sound of Drums stating that Timelords had a way of recognizing other Timelords no matter if they had regenerated. And Clara should have recognized her as well... I'm hoping for a better explanation than "Moffat screwed up", and that I actually missed something after two watchthroughs of the episode. Answer There seems to be a lot of in-canon uncertainty as to the extent to which Time Lords can recognise one another which far pre-dates Moffat's tenure. From the Time Lords page on Wikipedia : Whether or not Time Lords can recognise each other across regenerations is not made entirely clear: In The War Games, the War Chief recognises the Second Doctor despite his regeneration and it is implied that the Doctor knows him when they fir...

story identification - Animation: floating island, flying pests

At least 20 years ago I watched a short animated film which stuck in my mind. The whole thing was wordless, possibly European, and I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine it... It featured a flying island which was inhabited by some creatures who (in my memory) reminded me of the Moomins. The island was frequently bothered by large winged animals who swooped around, although I don't think they did any actual damage. At the end one of the moomin creatures suddenly gets a weird feeling, feels forced to climb to the top of the island and then plunges down a shaft right through the centre - only to emerge at the bottom as one of the flyers. Answer Skywhales from 1983. The story begins with a man warning the tribe of approaching skywhales. The drummers then warn everybody of the hunt as everyone get prepared to set "sail". Except one man is found in his home sleeping as the noise wake him up. He then gets ready and is about to take his weapon as he hesitates then decides ...

warhammer40k - What evidence supposedly supports Tau as related to the Necrontyr?

I've heard of rumours saying that the Tau from Warhammer 40K are in fact the Necrontyr. Is there anything that supports this statement, in WH40K canon? I just found this, on 1d4 chan 1 : Helping Necrons? Or are they Necrontyr descendants? An often overlooked issue is that Tau have no warp signatures, just like Necrons, hate Warpspawns and Warp in general, just like Necrons, have the exact same skull shape,stature and short lives, and the overwhelming need for Technology and beam weapons, JUST LIKE NECRONS. GW may have planned a race that simply prepares a pacified, multiracial galaxy for Necrons to feast upon, supported by Ethereals that have a C'tan phase blade. Then there is a reference of "dark seed in east" by the Deceiver, so the tricky C'tan might give Tzeentch the finger in the JUST AS PLANNED competition. Or maybe GW just has so little creativity that they simply made a new civ conforming to an Old One's standards without knowing it. Is this the connec...