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This is a minor plot point in Vernor Vinge's excellent SF novel A Fire Upon the Deep.

One of the premises of the novel's universe is that computational power is generally absurdly plentiful, but communications bandwidth over interstellar distances is not. Most communications are in plain text (modeled after USENET) but in some cases, "evocations" are used to extrapolate video and audio from an ultra-compressed data stream.

The trouble, of course, is that it's not very obvious what aspects of the image you're seeing are real, and what aspects were dreamed up by the system doing the extrapolating.



A main premise of the Fear the Sky trilogy as well but solved a different way. Machines representing various political factions from the home planet are uploaded with AI that mimics them emotionally and politically for all intents and purposes. I really enjoyed this book.


Eh, I personally enjoyed the series, but I wouldn't recommend anything beyond book 1. Book 2 is ok. Book 3 really spoiled the series for me because of the inconsistent behavior if the main character. (Keeping it vague to avoid spoilers)


Same. Notice I said "the book" while mentioning the trilogy ;-)


+1 recommendation for this trilogy


> it's not very obvious what aspects of the image you're seeing are real, and what aspects were dreamed up by the system doing the extrapolating.

It would be quite obvious unless the raw data before extrapolating is destroyed, for which there are no reason nor is it possible to stop others in the vincinity from receiving this raw data.


That assumes that the "raw data" is reasonably human-comprehensible (which neural network weights and activations are notoriously not) and/or that you have time to sit down and analyze the data at your leisure.

But saying more would be spoilery...


For that to be true the compression algorithm mustn’t be very efficient.




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