Comment by teraflop
7 years ago
This idea is the basis of an interesting plot point in Vernor Vinge's sci-fi novel A Fire Upon the Deep.
The book is set in a universe where long-distance, faster-than-light communication is possible, but extremely bandwidth-constrained. However, localized computational power is many orders of magnitude beyond what we have today. As a result, much of the communication on the "Known Net" is text (heavily inspired by Usenet) but you can also send an "evocation" of audio and/or video, which is extremely heavily compressed and relies on an intelligent system at the receiving end to reconstruct and extrapolate all the information that was stripped out.
The downside, of course, is that it can become difficult to tell which nuances were originally present, and which are confabulated.
Another example of the dangers of compression algorithms that are too clever for their own good: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/06/xerox_copier_flaw_m...
I love that book. I loved that the ships could send text messages across 10,000 light-years, provided the receiving end had an antenna swarm with the mass of a planet.
He played with the idea in at least one other story that I'm aware of, a short story where a human scientist on a planet just inside the Slow Zone (where no FTL is supposed to be possible) acquires a device from the Transcend (where FTL and AI are apparently trivial). The device is a terminal connected to a transcendent intelligence, and it can send and receive a few bits per second via FTL, even in the Slow Zone. Using those few bits it's able to transmit natural-language questions, and reproduce the answers to those questions, but the scientist can't decide whether he can trust it. Can the AI really model him well enough to understand his questions using that tiny amount of information? Can the answers coming back be anything but random? And then the solar weather starts acting a bit unusual...