human-made craft, have they written all the control software or is some
from an ancient relic? How many lines of code, total?
That sort if invites the quip, that even if humans have written all the
software, they propably don't understand it anyway.
Actually one could argue, that if the software is a mix of ancient alien
and human software, the alien part might be better understood. The alien
software will be intensivly researched and tested and all findings will be
written down immediatly. There will be no last minute bug fixes either,
because regardless if it's a bug or a feature, the software stays as it
is.
You'd need to spend much resources on quality management to get the amount
of testing and documentation on ordinary software and the lowest bidder
propably cuts corners.
We have a lot of legacy compiled code where I work. All we can do is
write interface software that compensates for known shortcomings, bugs,
etc, of the old code. (We don't have access to the source, and can't
edit the existing). Sometimes we can look at the underlying database,
and sometimes we can inject code there (or fiddle a specific date field,
for example), and then run the legacy code on it.
With military applications, this could extend to voltage probes and some
hardware overrides...
On the other hand, if the alien language is a millennia-long standard,
once you set up one interface language, it could help for all their
technology.
That said, consider the Rosetta stone -- one translator treated the job
as a code, the other as a language, and both got to the same end near
the same time... In our example, one person could start by interpreting
the words on screen, while an engineer could start at the functions,
then work up...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
--
Eric Funk
Knowledge Brings Fear -- Motto of Mars University, Futurama
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