A self-teaching archive for readers who are not human.
A sibling of STELE. STELE teaches a human to read a file from a hex dump — but it still falls back on English for its prose. XENOSTELE assumes nothing cultural: only that the recipient can read a one-dimensional stream of two-state symbols (bits) and that they do mathematics. From there it bootstraps everything — by demonstration, never by declaration — the way the Pioneer plaque, the Arecibo message, and the Voyager Golden Record tried to, but with the weaknesses engineered out.
Pure C, one file, no dependencies. Compile and run:
cl /W3 /D_CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS xenostele.c # MSVC (or:)
cc -O2 -o xenostele xenostele.c # gcc/clang
xenostele selftest # round-trip + damage-recovery proof
xenostele explain # the design, in brief
xenostele encode file.bin out.xeno [copies] [hamming]
xenostele decode out.xeno recovered.bin
xenostele image-encode picture.pbm out.xeno [copies] [hamming]
xenostele image-decode out.xeno recovered.pbm
| Their weakness | XENOSTELE |
|---|---|
| Arecibo makes you guess how to factor 1679 into a grid | Teaches — counts in tally marks, then demonstrates the number code |
| Numbers used ad-hoc binary with markers | A self-delimiting universal integer code (Elias-γ), taught by example — no field width or byte order is ever assumed |
| Zero error correction | Self-sync + checksum + N-copy repetition + XOR erasure coding + optional inner Hamming |
| One copy — a scratch kills it | Every copy is independently self-teaching; a fragment rebuilds the whole |
| Ambiguous orientation | An asymmetric beacon + sync mark fixes direction |
| Culturally loaded content (human figures) | Content self-validates: one frame decodes to the prime numbers, another to dimensionless physical constants — the reader confirms both the number code and shared physics from first principles |
| Dimensions had to be guessed for images | A 2-D image mode where width and height are stated, not inferred |
| Tied to a medium (grooved disk, radio burst) | A pure bit-stream — radio, etched wafer, DNA, anything with two states |
The deepest change: STELE still needs English. XENOSTELE needs only bits and mathematics.
Each rung is provable from the ones above it — the same discipline as STELE, pushed down to where nothing is assumed but two symbols and math.
0 bits the one unearned assumption: a linear stream of two states
1 beacon 1010... establishes two symbols, a clock, and a reading direction
2 sync a run of 24 ones (impossible in data) marks structure and lets a
reader re-find alignment after ANY damage, at any offset
3 counting pure unary tallies — a count carries no convention
4 code Elias-γ, taught by pairing each tally with its coded form;
self-delimiting, so a reader derives where every number ends
5 primes a frame decoding to 2,3,5,7,11,... — the content proves the decode
6 payload framed, checksummed by counting one-bits, repeated, XOR-protected
7 physics dimensionless constants (fine-structure constant ≈137.036, proton/
electron mass ratio ≈1836.15, g/2 ≈1.00116) as rationals — confirm
shared physics and anchor units to reality
8 image a 2-D mode: W×H pixels, dimensions STATED not guessed, row-major
from the top-left corner (round-trips a P4 .pbm bitmap)
9 inner FEC optional Hamming(7,4): heals a single bit-flip in every 7, applied
BEFORE the checksum judges the frame, for very noisy channels
- Self-synchronizing. The 24-ones sync mark cannot occur in data (bit-stuffing inserts a 0 after any 23 ones), so frame boundaries are always re-findable — even after corruption, even mid-stream. Clock slips (insertions/deletions) that would destroy every earlier record are survived here.
- Self-checking. Each frame ends with the count of its one-bits, in the number code. Verifiable with nothing but the ability to count.
- Redundant three ways. (a) N independent copies — a burst destroys one, the others rebuild it. (b) One XOR-parity frame per group of 8 — a fully-lost frame is the parity XOR its surviving group members (pure counting, no finite-field theory), recovering a lost frame even from a single copy. (c) Optional inner Hamming(7,4) heals scattered single-bit flips inside a frame before the checksum would reject it.
- Self-validating content. The prime frame and the physics frame let the reader confirm, from mathematics and physics alone, that the decode is right.
- Honest. If loss exceeds every defence, it is reported, never fabricated.
selftest output:
[PASS] prime self-check decodes to 15 primes
[PASS] physics frame carries 3 recognizable constants
[PASS] clean round-trip byte-identical
[PASS] recovered a 20% contiguous burst
[PASS] a 1/3 interior fragment rebuilt the whole payload
[PASS] single copy + destroyed frame rebuilt by XOR parity
[PASS] inner Hamming healed 18 flips that cost the plain code 14 frame(s)
[PASS] image mode: 37x41 bitmap round-tripped (dims recovered)
Redundancy costs space — the default (4 copies + parity) is several times the
payload. That is the correct trade for a first-contact beacon or a thousand-year
archive, and it is a knob: encode file out.xeno 1 for a single copy (XOR
parity still protects it), more copies and hamming for a harsher channel.
MIT. A companion to the STELE archive format.