Godelization, sf, etc. (was: Re: cypto + compression)

[zimm@alumni.cco.caltech.edu (Mark Edward Zimmerman)]

the sf story that you're alluding to is, I believe, Fred Pohl's "Gold
at the Starbow's End" --- a cover story in ANALOG magazine ca. 1968
--- which I remember fondly precisely because of the idea used which
you mention, namely, encoding a big message compactly as the sum of
various powers of small numbers ...  though the author got it pretty
badly wrong, as I pointed out in a letter published some months later
in the same magazine --- the sum of powers that he gave in the story
was *much* too small to hold a significant amount of information, and
(worse) he thought that one couldn't get any of the answer without
writing the entire number --- obviously wrong, as a little modular
arithmetic can get out the powers quite easily....  but it's a nice
idea and the story was quite good otherwise.... :-) ^z